Augustus. He preserved to the last his simple manners and somewhat rustic appearance; and it is believed that his character, amongst all the prevalent vices of Rome, remained free from reproach--saving only that with which he was taunted by the libertines of the capital, the reproach of personal purity. It is as much to his honour that Caligula should have ordered all his busts to be banished from the public libraries, as that St Augustin should have quoted him alone of heathen authors, in his celebrated ‘Confessions.’ THE PASTORALS. The earliest written poems of Virgil, as has been said, were his Pastorals. Of these we have ten remaining, sometimes called “Bucolics”--_i. e._, Songs of the Herdsmen--and sometimes “Eclogues,” as being “selections” from a larger number of similar compositions which the poet either never made public, or which at least are lost to us. The actual subjects of these poems are various, but they are usually introduced in the way of imaginary dialogue between Greek shepherds, keeping their flocks and herds at pasture in some imaginary woodland country, which the poet peoples with inhabitants and supplies with scenery at his will; mixing up, as poets only may, the features of his own Italian landscape with those of Sicily, borrowed, with much besides, from the Idylls of Theocritus, and with reminiscences of the Greek Arcadia. That pastoral faery-land, in which shepherds lay all day under beech-trees, playing on their pipes, either in rivalry for a musical prize or composing monodies on their lost loves, surely never existed in fact, however familiar to us in the language of ancient and modern poets. Such shepherds are as unreal as the satyrs and fauns and dryad-nymphs with whom a fanciful mythology had peopled the same region, and who are not unfrequently introduced by the pastoral poets in the company of their human _dramatis personæ_. The Arcadia of history was a rich and fertile district, well wooded and watered, and as prosaic as one of our own midland counties. Like them, if it had any reputation at all beyond that of being excellent pasture-ground, it was a reputation for dulness. It was celebrated for its breed of asses, and some of the qualities of the animal seem to have been shared by the natives themselves. “A slip of Arcadia” passed into a proverbial nickname for a boy who was the despair of his schoolmaster. The Arcadia of the poets and romance-writers, from classical times down to our own Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney, was, as Mr Conington says, “the poets’ golden land, in which imagination found a refuge from the harsh prosaic life of the present.” This literary fancy enjoyed a remarkable popularity from the early days of authorship down to a very recent date. Thyrsis and Amaryllis, Daphnis and Corydon, have had a continued poetical existence of something like fifteen hundred years, and talk very much the same language in the Pastorals of Pope that they did in the Greek Idylls. It