"_È arrivato, Signore!_" said the _vetturino_. True enough, I was at the door of the inn of Peschiera, and snuffed the stew of an Italian supper. Virgil closes the first book of the Georgics with a poetic forecast of the time when ploughmen should touch upon rusted war-weapons in their work, and turn out helmets empty, and bones of dead soldiers,--as indeed they might, and did. But how unlike a poem it will sound, when the schools are opened on the Rappahannock again, and the boy scans,--choking down his sobs,-- "Aut gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanes, Grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris," and the master veils his eyes! I fear that Virgil was harmed by the Georgican success, and became more than ever an adulator of the ruling powers. I can fancy him at a palace tea-drinking, where pretty court-lips give some witty turn to his "_Sic Vos, non Vobis_," and pretty court-eyes glance tenderly at Master Marius, who blushes, and asks some Sabina (not Poppæa) after Tibullus and his Delia. But a great deal is to be forgiven to a man who can turn compliments as Virgil turned them. What can be more exquisite than that allusion to the dead boy Marcellus, in the Sixth Book of the Æneid? He is reading it aloud before Augustus, at Rome. Mæcenas is there from his tall house upon the Esquiline; possibly Horace has driven over from the Sabine country,--for, alone of poets, he was jolly enough to listen to the reading of a poem not his own. Above all, the calm-faced Octavia, Cæsar's sister, and the rival of Cleopatra, is present. A sad match she has made of it with Antony; and her boy Marcellus is just now dead,--dying down at Baiæ, notwithstanding the care of that famous doctor, Antonius Musa, first of hydropaths. Virgil had read of the Sibyl,--of the entrance to Hades,--of the magic metallic bough that made Charon submissive,--of the dog Cerberus, and his sop,--of the Greeks who welcomed Æneas,--then of the father Anchises, who told the son what brave fate should belong to him and his,--warning him, meantime, with alliterative beauty, against the worst of wars,-- "Ne, pueri, ne tanta animis assuescite bella; Neu patriæ validas in viscera vertite vires,"-- too late, alas! There were those about Augustus who could sigh over this. Virgil reads on: Anchises is pointing out to Æneas that old Marcellus who fought Hannibal; and beside him, full of beauty, strides a young hero about whom the attendants throng. "And who is the young hero," demands Æneas, "over whose brow a dark fate is brooding?" (The motherless Octavia is listening with a yearning heart.) And Anchises, the tears starting to his eyes, says,--