or, still closer, of Queen Anne in England, as has been more than once pointed out. Sainte-Beuve, with his usual insight, has seized upon this resemblance to explain why Virgil, in the account of the shipwreck in the first book (vv. 81 _seq._), which is an ingenious cento from the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, should have dropped two of Homer’s most striking similes: that the pilot, struck by the falling mast, went overboard “like a diver,” and that the scattered swimmers—_rari nantes in gurgite vasto_—were borne like sea-birds on the wave. Virgil omits these images, says the French critic, just because they are so salient, so life-like, so frank and real. “Comparisons of that sort the age of Augustus, like the age of Louis XIV., rather eschewed. They were by no means to the taste of Frenchmen in the days of Saint-Evremond and Segrais (I use extreme terms purposely)—men of society, of the drawing-room, nice scholars who had been often in the Hôtel Rambouillet but little at sea, and to whom divers and sea-birds were unfamiliar sights. The Frenchman of that time preferred general descriptions to images too minutely particularized, and so, too, in a measure, did the Roman of the time of Augustus and the circle of Mæcenas. Mæcenas is not so far, either in taste or philosophy, from Saint-Evremond.” With some reservations, much the same thing applies to the ages of Dryden and of Pope—to Pope’s age and to Pope himself more strictly, perhaps, than to Dryden or his time; so that one is half inclined to think it a caprice of literary destiny that Pope should have been set to translate Homer, and Dryden Virgil, rather than the reverse. Not that the result would have been a better Homer, if we may judge from Dryden’s sample work in the first book of the _Iliad_; a better Homer than Pope’s was perhaps not to be looked for in an age which in its poetry thought it fine to call a spade—about which it was apt to be only too plain-spoken in free fireside prose—an agricultural implement, and the bucolic person who wielded it a swain. Pope’s famous ironical essay in the _Guardian_ on his own and Ambrose Phillips’ pastorals is a curious illustration of the then passion for putting Nature into hoops and periwig. Phillips, in a dim, blundering way, is nearer right with his Cecilias and Rogers, who talk at least like ploughmen and milkmaids, than Pope with his gentle Delias and sprightly Sylvias, who converse like masquerading duchesses; but as all the world happened to be masquerading, the laugh was with Pope.