IDYL VII.

"A seeming virgin with a virgin's bloom,

Instead of arms, his white hand plied the loom."-P. 278.

His mother, the silver-footed Thetis, foreknowing that Achilles would perish if he went to the siege of Troy, contrived that he should be concealed at the court of Lycomedes, King of Scyros, in woman's apparel. He there became familiar with the king's daughter, Deïdamia; and Pyrrhus was the fruit of that familiarity. This idyl, like the preceding, is only a fragment.

IDYL X.

The ancients, heathen though they were, had a much finer sense of friendship than the moderns, Christians though they be. Akenside must have been thinking of the instances of friendship which his classical recollections, and not his actual experience, supplied (though, indeed, he had himself good grounds for believing in its existence), when he wrote:

“Is aught so fair

In all the dewy landscapes of the spring,
In the bright eye of Hesper, or the morn,
In nature's fairest form, is aught so fair
As virtuous friendship?"

Orestes and Pylades figure as fast friends in the Greek dramatists; Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad.

Theseus and Peirithous from being foes became devoted friends. Peirithous assisted Theseus in carrying off Helen, who was then about ten years of age; and whom he placed under the care of his mother Ethra, at Aphidna, with the intention of keeping her there till she was of a marriageable age. In the mean time he prepared to assist Peirithous in a similar but somewhat more dangerous attempt; for that hero, it seems, having lost his wife Hippodamia, and feeling the solitude of his chamber irksome, resolved to relieve it by bringing up from the under-world the lovely queen of the infernal monarch. Theseus accompanied him on this desperate adventure; but

Hades knowing their design, seized them, and placed them on an enchanted rock at the entrance of his domain; where they sat, unable to move, till Hercules, when he was going down to the realm of shadows for the dog Cerberus, recognised them, and released Theseus. He would have done the same good turn for Peirithous, but was checked by a divine intimation. Theseus re-ascended to the upper world; but there, on that enchanted rock, sits Peirithous to this day- according to the legend.

NOTICE OF MOSCHUS.

THIS poet was born at Syracuse. In his epitaph on Bion he acknowledges that he had been instructed in song by that bard. His style resembles his master's. These poets, it must be confessed, like the courtly Ovid, even when he is most poetical, were rather fanciful than imaginative; but nothing can exceed their exquisite elegance. Their verse is music. They have been often imitated; but, excepting "Lycidas” and “Adonais,” none of the imitations have equalled the "Epitaph on Adonis," and the "Epitaph on Bion." The "Runaway Love,” and the "Choice," by Moschus, are exquisite poems; and there are some passages of great beauty in the rest of his few "Remains." His poems were translated into elegant Latin verse by Politian.

NOTES ON MOSCHUS.

IDYL I.

"If any one has in the highway seen
My straying Eros, and reports to me
His whereabout, he shall rewarded be."-P. 287.

"Thou sure and firm-set earth,

Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear

Thy very stones prate of my whereabout."— Macbeth.

Ben Jonson, in his Masque, the " Hue and Cry after Cupid," has imitated Moschus. The proclamation, however, is addressed by the Graces to the softer sex, with one of whom Aphrodite supposed young Love to be concealed.

FIRST GRACE.

"Beauties, have ye seen this toy,

Called Love, a little boy,

Almost naked, wanton, blind,
Cruel now, and then as kind?

If he be amongst you, say,

He is Venus' runaway.