By lust? Thou shouldst have then had fear for those Upon thy side; but now too late thou bring’st Idle reproaches and unjust complaints.” In rendering the phrase _fovive cupidine bello_ (“or battles flame with passion fanned,” says Conington) Delille has a characteristic touch almost worthy of Segrais: “Me vit-on allumer, pour embraser les terres Au flambeau de l’amour les torches de la guerre.” In the speech of Turnus in the eleventh book the Trojans become “brigands” and “barbarous assassins,” quite as if the Rutuli chief were a deputy of the Left Centre addressing his friends on the Right. If the good abbé had written a few years later he would no doubt have made them Communists. But his speech of Juno, though rather free, has many fine touches; and, indeed, the French seems to hit off the women’s part of the _Æneid_ better than our English. Thus, the dumb rage with which Juno must have listened to Venus is well hinted in the line, “Junon muette écoute auprès de son époux,” though it is by no means so literal as Cranch’s. Of the three translators of Virgil we are now considering, Mr. Morris certainly brought to his task the greatest natural and acquired gifts. Nay, had we been asked from the ranks of living English writers to pick out the one who could give us Virgil most fitly, with least loss of majesty or beauty, in an English dress, we think we should have named the author of _Jason_ and the _Earthly Paradise_. For Mr. Morris is not only a poet—a poet of very nearly the first order; whereas Mr. Cranch, we are constrained to say in the teeth of the Boston muses, is hardly more than a poet by brevet—he is also a classical scholar who, in point of general acquirements at least, is a rival whom even Prof. Conington would respect. Since the time of Dryden, and not excepting him, we know of no English poet—unless, perhaps, Pope and the present laureate—whose natural genius should seem to have fitted him so well as Mr. Morris to interpret the _Æneid_. His own poetry shows many of the most distinctive qualities of Virgil’s verse: its elegance, its pathos, its pregnant allusiveness, above all the pensive grace, the under-note of tender sadness, that runs through all the strain of the _Æneid_, the underlying _motif_ of its theme. And though the form of narrative verse, in which Mr. Morris has chiefly exercised his powers, is sufficiently remote in tone and spirit from the tone and spirit of epic narrative, yet here and there, as in passages of _Jason_ and of the _Lovers of Gudrun_, he has come as near to striking the true epic note as any modern poet we recall, unless it be Mr. Matthew Arnold in his admirable and touching fragment of _Sohrab and Rustum_. Add to this his minute and well-digested knowledge of classic mythology and legend, and his rare mastery of the Saxon and Romance elements of the language, in which so much of its tear-compelling power resides—what Joubert might have called