of all those excellent pieces which he afterwards finished, or was forced to leave less perfect by his death. But, whether it were the unwholesomeness of his native air, of which he somewhere complains; or his too great abstinence, and night-watchings at his study, to which he was always addicted, as Augustus observes; or possibly the hopes of improving himself by travel--he resolved to remove to the more southern tract of Italy; and it was hardly possible for him not to take Rome in his way, as is evident to any one who shall cast an eye on the map of Italy. And therefore the late French editor of his works is mistaken, when he asserts, that he never saw Rome till he came to petition for his estate. He gained the acquaintance of the master of the horse to Octavius, and cured a great many diseases of horses, by methods they had never heard of. It fell out, at the same time, that a very fine colt, which promised great strength and speed, was presented to Octavius; Virgil assured them, that he came of a faulty mare, and would prove a jade: Upon trial, it was found as he had said. His judgment proved right in several other instances; which was the more surprising, because the Romans knew least of natural causes of any civilized nation in the world; and those meteors and prodigies, which cost them incredible sums to expiate, might easily have been accounted for by no very profound naturalist. It is no wonder, therefore, that Virgil was in so great reputation, as to be at last introduced to Octavius himself. That prince was then at variance with Marc Antony, who vexed him with a great many libelling letters, in which he reproaches him with the baseness of his parentage, that he came of a scrivener, a rope-maker, and a baker, as Suetonius tells us. Octavius finding that Virgil had passed so exact a judgment upon the breed of dogs and horses, thought that he possibly might be able to give him some light concerning his own. He took him into his closet, where they continued in private a considerable time. Virgil was a great mathematician; which, in the sense of those times, took in astrology; and, if there be any thing in that art, (which I can hardly believe,) if that be true which the ingenious De la Chambre asserts confidently, that, from the marks on the body, the configuration of the planets at a nativity may be gathered, and the marks might be told by knowing the nativity, never had one of those artists a fairer opportunity to show his skill than Virgil now had; for Octavius had moles upon his body, exactly resembling the constellation called _Ursa Major_. But Virgil had other helps; the predictions of Cicero and Catulus,[272] and that vote of the senate had gone abroad, that no child, born at Rome in the year of his nativity, should be bred up, because the seers assured them that an emperor was born that year. Besides this, Virgil had heard of the Assyrian and Egyptian prophecies, (which, in truth, were no other