His sickliness, studies, and the troubles he met with, turned his hair gray before the usual time. He had a hesitation in his speech, as many other great men; it being rarely found that a very fluent elocution, and depth of judgment, meet in the same person: his aspect and behaviour rustic and ungraceful; and this defect was not likely to be rectified in the place where he first lived, nor afterwards, because the weakness of his stomach would not permit him to use his exercises. He was frequently troubled with the head-ach, and spitting of blood; spare of diet, and hardly drank any wine. Bashful to a fault; and, when people crowded to see him, he would slip into the next shop, or by-passage, to avoid them. As this character could not recommend him to the fair sex, he seems to have as little consideration for them as Euripides himself. There is hardly the character of one good woman to be found in his poems: he uses the word _mulier_ but once in the whole "Æneïs," then too by way of contempt, rendering literally a piece of a verse out of Homer. In his "Pastorals," he is full of invectives against love: in the "Georgics," he appropriates all the rage of it to the females. He makes Dido, who never deserved that character, lustful and revengeful to the utmost degree, so as to die devoting her lover to destruction; so changeable, that the Destinies themselves could not fix the time of her death; but Iris, the emblem of inconstancy, must determine it. Her sister is something worse.[278] He is so far from passing such a compliment upon Helen, as the grave old counsellor in Homer does, after nine years' war, when, upon the sight of her, he breaks out into this rapture, in the presence of king Priam: None can the cause of these long wars despise; The cost bears no proportion to the prize: Majestic charms in every feature shine; Her air, her port, her accent, is divine. However, let the fatal beauty go, &c.