And now he took up a resolution of travelling into Greece, there to set the last hand to this work; proposing to devote the rest of his life to philosophy, which had been always his principal passion. He justly thought it a foolish figure for a grave man to be overtaken by death, whilst he was weighing the cadence of words, and measuring verses, unless necessity should constrain it, from which he was well secured by the liberality of that learned age. But he was not aware, that, whilst he allotted three years for the revising of his poem, he drew bills upon a failing bank: for, unhappily meeting Augustus at Athens, he thought himself obliged to wait upon him into Italy; but, being desirous to see all he could of the Greek antiquities, he fell into a languishing distemper at Megara. This, neglected at first, proved mortal. The agitation of the vessel (for it was now autumn, near the time of his birth,) brought him so low, that he could hardly reach Brindisi. In his sickness, he frequently, and with great importunity, called for his scrutoir, that he might burn his "Æneïs:" but, Augustus interposing by his royal authority, he made his last will, (of which something shall be said afterwards;) and, considering probably how much Homer had been disfigured by the arbitrary compilers of his works, obliged Tucca and Varius to add nothing, nor so much as fill up the breaks he left in his poem. He ordered that his bones should be carried to Naples, in which place he had passed the most agreeable part of his life. Augustus, not only as executor and friend, but according to the duty of the _Pontifex Maximus_, when a funeral happened in his family, took care himself to see the will punctually executed. He went out of the world with all that calmness of mind with which the ancient writer of his life says he came into it; making the inscription of his monument himself; for he began and ended his poetical compositions with an epitaph. And this he made, exactly according to the law of his master Plato on such occasions, without the least ostentation: I sung flocks, tillage, heroes; Mantua gave Me life, Brundusium death, Naples a grave. A SHORT ACCOUNT OF HIS PERSON, MANNERS, AND FORTUNE. He was of a very swarthy complexion, which might proceed from the southern extraction of his father; tall and wide-shouldered, so that he may be thought to have described himself under the character of Musæus, whom he calls the best of poets-- ----_Medium nam plurima turba Hunc habet, atque humeris extantem suspicit altis._