The unhappy Dares is borne off by his friends in miserable plight,--with half his teeth knocked out, blood streaming from his face, and hardly able to stand. All the savage has been roused in Entellus’s nature by the fight. He is not half satisfied that his victim has escaped him. He would gladly have sacrificed him to the memory of his great master Eryx,--here, on the spot where that hero fought his own last fight. He lays his hand upon the bull, the prize of battle, and addresses Æneas and the spectators. Dryden’s version of this passage, though it contains as much of Dryden as of Virgil, has justly been praised as very noble:-- “O goddess-born, and ye Dardanian host, Mark with attention, and forgive my boast; Learn what I was by what remains, and know From what impending fate you saved my foe! Sternly he spoke, and then confronts the bull; And on his ample forehead aiming full, The deadly stroke descending pierced the skull. Down drops the beast, nor needs a second wound, But sprawls in pangs of death, and spurns the ground. ‘Then thus, in Dares’ stead, I offer this: Eryx, accept a nobler sacrifice; Take the last gift my withered arms can yield-- Thy gauntlets I resign, and here renounce the field.’” Mr Conington has well remarked that here we have, no doubt, “the veteran combatant’s feelings as conceived by the veteran poet.” He wrote the lines in his sixty-second year, and they harmonise pathetically with the words in his dedication: “What I now offer to your lordship is the wretched remainder of a sickly age.” We are not obliged to take this self-depreciation too literally: whatever may be the shortcomings of Dryden’s translation, the hand of the old poet had no more lost its vigour than that of Entellus.