plies his office of transporting the dead, performing the duties which Homer assigns to Mercury. But it is not all who even in death are allowed to pass the gloomy river. Only those who have received all due rites of burial can claim to enter the final abode of spirits at once; those unhappy ones who from any cause lie unburied have to wander, moaning and shivering, on the other side, for a space of a hundred years. So the Sibyl explains to Æneas, when he marks with surprise how the shades all crowd eagerly to the boat-side praying for admission, and how the grisly ferryman drives some back with his oar. It is a sad thought to the hero; for amongst the rejected he sees some of his own companions who had perished in the storm off the coast of Carthage. Among them, too, he sees the figure of his late pilot Palinurus, who tells him the story of his unhappy fate; how, after all, he was not drowned, but, clinging to the piece of rudder which had broken away with him, had drifted three days and nights upon the waves, and had at last swam ashore on the fated coast of Italy. There the cruel natives had attacked and killed him, as he struggled up the cliffs; and now his corpse lies tossed to and fro amid the breakers in the harbour of Velia. He prays of his leader either to sail back there and to “Give him a little earth for charity;” or, by his influence with these Powers below, to get the law of exclusion relaxed in his favour. This last request the Sibyl rebukes at once, as utterly inorthodox and heretical; but comforts him at the same time with the assurance that the barbarous natives shall be plagued by heaven for their abominable deed, nor shall they find deliverance until they solemnly propitiate his shade by the erection of a mound and the establishment of funeral honours, and call the spot by the name of Palinurus--which name, the Sibyl declares, shall endure there for ever. The oracular voice in this case was not deceitful: the place, or supposed place, is still called “Punta di Palinuro.” Virgil’s imperial audience might know it well, for Augustus was very nearly himself becoming a sacrifice on that very spot to the manes of the ancient pilot, many of his ships having been cast away on that very headland. Charon is by no means gracious to the intruders. At first he warns them off. He has no pleasant recollections of former visitors from upper air, who, without the proper qualification of being previously dead and duly burnt or buried, had made their way against all rule into this abode of shadows. Hercules had come there, and carried off their watchful guardian Cerberus: Theseus and his friend Pirithous had even tried to do the same by Proserpine.