Virgil is so far from this complaisant humour, that his hero falls into an unmanly and ill-timed deliberation, whether he should not kill her in a church;[279] which directly contradicts what Deiphobus says of her, Æneid vi., in that place where every body tells the truth. He transfers the dogged silence of Ajax's ghost to that of Dido; though that be no very natural character to an injured lover, or a woman. He brings in the Trojan matrons setting their own fleet on fire, and running afterwards, like witches on their _sabbat_, into the woods. He bestows indeed some ornaments on the character of Camilla; but soon abates his favour, by calling her _aspera_ and _horrenda virgo_: he places her in the front of the line for an ill omen of the battle, as one of the ancients has observed. We may observe, on this occasion, it is an art peculiar to Virgil, to intimate the event by some preceding accident. He hardly ever describes the rising of the sun, but with some circumstance which fore-signifies the fortune of the day. For instance, when Æneas leaves Africa and Queen Dido, he thus describes the fatal morning: _Tithoni croceum linquens Aurora cubile._ [And, for the remark, we stand indebted to the curious pencil of Pollio.] The Mourning Fields (Æneid vi.) are crowded with ladies of a lost reputation: hardly one man gets admittance; and that is Cæneus, for a very good reason. Latinus's queen is turbulent and ungovernable, and at last hangs herself: and the fair Lavinia is disobedient to the oracle, and to the king, and looks a little flickering after Turnus. I wonder at this the more, because Livy represents her as an excellent person, and who behaved herself with great wisdom in her regency during the minority of her son; so that the poet has done her wrong, and it reflects on her posterity. His goddesses make as ill a figure: Juno is always in a rage, and the Fury of heaven; Venus grows so unreasonably confident, as to ask her husband to forge arms for her bastard son, which were enough to provoke one of a more phlegmatic temper than Vulcan was. Notwithstanding all this raillery of Virgil's, he was certainly of a very amorous disposition, and has described all that is most delicate in the passion of love: but he conquered his natural inclination by the help of philosophy, and refined it into friendship, to which he was extremely sensible. The reader will admit of or reject the following conjecture, with the free leave of the writer, who will be equally pleased either way. Virgil had too great an opinion of the influence of the heavenly bodies: and, as an ancient writer says, he was born under the sign of Virgo; with which nativity he much pleased himself, and would exemplify her virtues in his life. Perhaps it was thence that he took his name of _Virgil_ and _Parthenias_, which does not necessarily signify _base-born_. Donatus and Servius, very good grammarians, give a quite contrary sense of it. He seems to make