So the gay striplings lash in eager sport
A top, in giddy circles round a court;

In rapid rings it whirls, and spins aloud,
Admir'd with rapture by the blooming croud;
From ev'ry stroke flies humming o'er the ground,
And gains new spirits as the blows go round.

PITT.

My thoughts were so attentive to the aptness of this simile, that I had almost transcribed the last line, "as the glass goes round." Let us examine the justness of the image. A drunken person kept up by the strength and repeated assistance of spirituous liquors, can scarce be more minutely described than by a top, sustained entirely from the lashes of constant whipping. The top, if the lashes cease, reels, and is in the utmost danger of falling. But what are the highest effects of those lashes; the same as the effects of strong liquors. The top having jumped about, not from a proper agility of its own, but by the force impelled upon it, falls asleep, and snores most lethargically loud. The moment the sleep is at an end, the wooden body requires more lashes; otherwise, with an awkward kind of rumbling noise, it waddles, reels, and tumbles headlong to the ground. By such a similitude, Virgil's strokes of satire, which are always hid with the utmost caution

4

and bashfulness, appear most emphatically adapted to the mark at which they aim. But the poet, in so conspicuous a character as Amata's, thinking it necessary to become less mysterious, unfolds the hints that he has already given us, by shewing the queen openly and indecently devoted to Bacchus :

She flies the town, and, mixing with a throng
Of madding matrons, bears the bride along.
Wand'ring thro' woods and wilds, and devious ways,
And with these arts the Trojan match delays.
She feign'd the rites of Bacchus, cried aloud,
And to the buxom god the virgin vow'd.
Evo, O Bacchus, thus began the song;
And Evo, answered all the female throng.
O virgin worthy thee alone! she cried;
O worthy thee alone! the crew replied.

DRYDEN.

The meaning of these lines, and of some other immediately subsequent, seems very obvious. The queen, after having exposed herself to an amazing degree in town, resolved to pursue her bacchanalian revels more at leisure, and less publicly, in the country. She withdrew to some distance from the city, and carried with her the princess her daughter. As soon as the place of her retirement was known, she was followed by a numerous set of courtiers of her

own sex and then the poet proceeds to tell us, that her majesty, and the Latian ladies, were guilty of excesses, which, from his description, must evidently have been inspired by the strength and potency of wine. They sung, they shouted, they danced, and practised every frantic wildness, that suggested itself to their thoughts and inventions. But what rendered the indecency still greater, was, their pranks being executed under the mask of religion, and the affectation of rites due to a God. After such a scene of immorality, it was highly proper in the poet to bring the chief actress to a shameful and uncommon exit. The catastrophe is described by Dryden in a very masterly and pathetic manner :

Mad with her anguish, impotent to bear
The mighty grief, she loaths the vital air;
She calls herself the cause of all this ill,

And owns the dire effects of her ungovern'd will
She raves against the gods, she beats her breast,
She tears with both her hands her purple vest:
Then round a beam a running noose she tied,
And fasten'd by the neck, obscenely died.

Here we see the horrors and the effects of a guilty conscience; blasphemy, despair, and an untimely death. The objection still lies against the poet, in having delineated the cha

racter of a lady, and more especially of a queen, in the odious light of ebriety. The objection might have weight, if, in the opposite scale, we did not consider that Amata had in the most violent manner, declared herself against Lavinia's marriage with Æneas; the supposed and acknowledged ancestor of Julius and Augustus Cæsar. What higher compliment could Virgil pay to his imperial patron, than to represent the Latian queen, and all those of her friends and followers, who were determined against the Trojan alliance, as a set of frantic, mad, intoxicated creatures, averse to every wholesome counsel, regardless of sacred prophecies, and even disobedient to the dictates of oracles, and the venerable declarations of the gods.

But I suspect that the poet had still a farther view. He wrote his Eneid at a time when luxury, and its companion intemperance, were at their meridian height in the court of Augustus. I cannot help being tempted to infer, that Virgil aimed, not only at describing the general bad effects of bacchanalian mysteries in the female sex, but at exposing the madness and follies which the Roman ladies were guilty of in particular, by too violent a devotion to the son of Semele. It may be difficult positively to determine, whether or not the Mantuan poet

intended such a particular piece of tacit satire, but it is certain that ebriety must ever draw upon itself the severest and most shocking catastrophe, ill health, ill humour, a painful death, or suicide.

I could wish, madam, in the pursuit of your paper, that you, who are a water drinker, would give us some animadversions upon an evil, from which the present age is not totally exempt. Permit me to subscribe myself, with the most perfect devotion,

Mrs. ****'s constant reader,

Servant, and admirer,

JOHANNES AMATISSIMUS.

OLD MAID, No. 14.

OLD MAID, No. 23.