which the hero thus cuts himself off from all our sympathies. His most ingenious apologists-and he has found many-appeal to us in vain. Upon the audience or the readers of his own time, no doubt, the effect might have been different. To the critics of Augustus's court, love-or what they understood by it-was a mere weakness in the hero. The call which Heaven had conveyed to him was to found the great empire of the future; and because he obeys the call at the expense of his tenderest feelings, the poet gives him always his distinctive epithet-the "pious" Æneas. The word "pious," it must be remembered, implies in the Latin the recognition of all duties to one's country and one's parents, as well as to the gods. And in all these senses Eneas would deserve it. But to an English mind, the "piety" which pleads the will of Heaven as an excuse for treachery to a woman, only adds a deeper hue of infamy to the transaction. It "Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse." But our story must not wait for us to discuss too curiously the morals of the hero. Eneas has thought to make his preparations without the knowledge of the queenwhile she the fire and bitterness of the original. The "False as thou art, and more than false, forsworn! of man's injustice why should I complain? Justice is fled, and truth is now no more. I saved the shipwrecked exile on my shore: I took the traitor to my throne and bed: The rest-I stored and rigged his ruined fleet. Now Lycian lots; and now the Delian god; Of heavenly powers were touched with human fate! Go seek thy promised kingdom through the main! When death has once dissolved her mortal frame, "Still dreams her happy dream, nor thinks That aught can break those golden links." But as the poet goes on to say, "Who can cheat the eyes of love?" Dido soon learns his change of purpose, and taxes him openly Dido shall come, in a black sulph'ry flame, with his baseness and ingratitude. The whole of this fourth book of the Eneid "The Passion of Dido," as it has been called-is of a very high order of tragic pathos. The queen is by turns furious and pathetic; now she hurls menaces and curses against her false lover, now she condescends to pitiable entreaty. The Trojan chief's defence, such as it is, is that he had never meant to stay. He is bound, the pilgrim of Heaven, for Latium. His father Anchises is warning him continually in the visions of the night not to linger here: and now the messenger of the gods in person has come to chide this fond delay. The grand storm of wrath in which the injured queen bursts upon him in reply has severely taxed the powers of all Virgil's English translators. They seem to have felt themselves no more of a match for "the fury of a woman scorned" than Eneas was. Certainly they all fail, more or less, to give "Her speech half done she breaks away, And to her marble chamber bear." The Trojans prepare to depart; but the enamored queen makes one more despair. ing effort to detain her faithless guest. She sends her sister to ask at least for some short space of delay-until she shall have schooled herself to bear his loss. Eneas is obdurate in his "piety." Then her last resolve is taken. She cheats her sister into the belief that she has found some spells potent enough to restrain the truant lover. Part of the charm is that his armour, and all that had belonged to him while in her So a company, must be consumed by fire. lofty pile is built in the palace-court; but it is to be the funeral pile of Dido. As she looks forth from the turret of her palace at daybreak, she sees the ships of Æneas already far in the offing; for, warned again by Mercury, that there will be risk of his departure being prevented by force if he delays, he has already set sail under cover of the night. For a moment the queen thinks of ordering her seamen to give chase; but it is a mere passing phase of her despair. She contents herself with imprecating an eternal enmity between his race and hers-fulfilled, as the poet means us to bear in mind, in the long and bloody wars betwen Rome and Carthage. "And, Tyrians, you through time to come No love, no league 'twixt race and race, Oft as our hands can wield the sword: With a master's hand the poet enhances the glories of his country by this prophetic introduction of the terrible Hannibal. The peaceful empire of the Cæsar, before whom East and West bow, is thrown into the broadest light by reference to those early days when Rome lay almost at the mercy of her implacable enemy. "Then, maddening over crime, the queen With bloodshot eyes, and sanguine streaks Fresh painted on her quivering cheeks, And wanning o'er with death foreseen, Through inner portals widely fares, Scales the high pile with swift ascent, And pausing, thought awhile and wept: When fate and heaven were kind, My life is lived, and I have played [DUGALD STEWART, a Scottish metaphysician of great eminence, was professor of moral philosophy in the College of Edinburgh, where he was born in 1753, and died 1828. His " Philosophy of the Human Mind," (1792,) "Moral Philosophy," (1793,) "Progress of Philosophy," (1816,) and "Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man," (1828,) are his principal works.] It is generally supposed, that of all our fac ulties, memory is that which nature has bestowed in the most unequal degrees on dif ferent individuals; and it is far from being impossible that this opinion may be well founded. If, however, we consider that there is scarcely any man who has not memory sufficient to learn the use of language, and learn to recognize, at the first glance, the appearances of an infinite num ber of familiar objects; besides acquiring such an acquaintance with the laws of nature, and the ordinary course of human affairs, as is necessary for directing his conduct in life, we shall be satisfied that the original disparities among men, in this respect, are by no means so immense as they seem to be at first view; and that much is to be ascribed to differént habits of attention, and to a difference of election among the various events presented to the curiosity. It is worthy of remark, also, that those individuals who possess unusual powers of memory with respect to any one class of objects, are commonly as remarkably defi cient in some of the other applications of that faculty. I knew a person who, though completely ignorant of Latin, was able to repeat over thirty or forty lines of Virgil, after having heard them once read to him -not with perfect exactness, but with such a degree of resemblance as (all circum stances considered) was truly astonishing; yet this person (who was in the condition of a servant) was singularly deficient in memory in all cases in which that faculty is of real practical utility. He was noted in every family in which he had been employed for habits of forgetfulness, and could scarcely deliver an ordinary message without committing some blunder. A similar observation, I can almost venture to say, will be found to apply to by the far greater number of those in whom this faculty seems to exhibit a preternatural or anomalous degree of force. The varieties of memory are indeed wonderful, but they ought not to be confounded with inequalities of memory. One man is distinguished by a power of recollecting names, and dates, and genealogies; a second, by the multiplicity of speculations and of general conclusions treasured up in his intellect; a third, by the facility with which words and combinations of words (the very words of a speaker or of an author) seem to lay hold of his mind; a fourth, by the quickness with which he seizes and appropriates the sense and meaning of an author, while the phraseology and style seem altogether to escape his notice; a fifth, by his memory for poetry; a sixth, by his memory for music; a seventh, by his memory for architecture, statuary, and painting, and all the other objects of taste which are addressed to the eye. All these different powers seem miraculous to those who do not possess them; and as they are apt to be supposed by superficial observers to be commonly united in the same individuals, they contribute much to encourage those exaggerated estimates concerning the original inequalities among men in respect to this faculty which I am now endeavouring to reduce to their first standard. As the great purpose to which this facalty is subservient is to enable us to collect and to retain, for the future regulation of It is but rarely that these three qualities are united in the same person. We often, indeed, meet with a memory which is at once susceptible and ready; but I doubt much if such memories be commonly very retentive; for the same set of habits which are favourable to the first two qualities are adverse to the third. Those individuals, for example, who, with a view to conversation, make a constant business of informing themselves with respect to the popular topics of the day, or of turning over the ephemeral publications subservient to the amusement or to the politics of the times, are naturally led to cultivate a susceptibility and readiness of memory, but have no inducement to aim at that permanent retention of selected ideas which enables the scientific student to combine the most remote materials, and to concentrate at will, on a particular object, all the scattered lights of his experience and of his reflections. Such men (as far as my observation has reached) seldom possess a familiar or correct acquaintance even with those classical remains of our own earlier writers which have ceased to furnish topics of discourse to the circles of fashion. A stream of novelties is perpetually passing through their minds, and the faint impressions which it leaves soon vanish to make way for others, like the traces which the ebbing tide leaves upon the sand. Nor is this all. portion as the associating principles which lay the foundation of susceptibility and readiness predominate in the memory, those which form the basis of our more solid and lasting acquisitions may be expected to be weakened, as a natural consequence of the general laws of our intellectual frame. OF MINDEN. From the Loves of the Plants. In pro [Dr. ERASMUS DARWIN, an English naturalist and didactic poet, born 1731, died 1802, wrote a widely cir our conduct, the results of our past expe- DEATH OF ELIZA AT THE BATTLE rience, it is evident that the degree of perfection which it attains in the case of dif ferent persons must vary; first, with the facility of making the original acquisition; secondly, with the permanence of the acquisition; and thirdly, with the quickness or readiness with which the individual is able, on particular occasions, to apply it to use. The qualities, therefore, of a good memory are, in the first place, to be susceptible; secondly, to be retentive; and thirdly, to be ready. culated poem entitled "The Botanic Garden" (1791), explaining the economy of vegetation and the loves of plants. Also, "Zoonomia" (1794), “Phytologia” (1799), and The Temple of Nature" (1803).] Now stood Eliza on the wood-crowned height, Bought with bold eye amid the bloody strife While round her brows bright beams of Honour dart, "O spare, ye war-hounds, spare their tender age; From tent to tent the impatient warrior flies, Fear in his heart, and frenzy in his eyes; Eliza's name along the camp he calls, "Eliza" echoes through the canvas walls; There was a little woman on board with a little baby; and both little woman and little child were cheerful, good-looking, bright-eyed, and fair to see. The little woman had been passing a long time with her sick mother in New York, and had left her home in St. Louis in that condition in which ladies who truly love their lords desire to be. The baby was born in her Quick through the murmuring gloom his footsteps tread, mother's house, and she had not seen her O'er groaning heaps, the dying and the dead, "O heavens !" he cried, "my first rash vow forgive; These bind to earth, for these I pray to live !" Round his chill babes he wrapped his crimson vest, And clasped them sobbing to his aching breast. VOL. III. husband (to whom she was now returning) for twelve months, having left him a month or two after their marriage. Well, to be sure, there never was a little woman so full of hope, and tenderness, and love, and anxiety, as this little woman was; and all day long she wondered whether "he" would be at the wharf; and whether "he" had got her letter; and whether, if she sent the baby ashore by somebody else, "he" would know it, meeting it in the street; which, seeing that he had never set eyes upon it in his life, was not very likely in the abstract, but was probable enough to the young mother. She was such an artless little creature, and was in such a sunny, beaming, hopeful state, and let out all this matter clinging close about her heart so freely, that all the other lady-passengers entered into the spirit of it as much as she; and the captain (who heard 58 all about it from his wife) was wondrous sly, I promise you, inquiring every time we met at table, as if in forgetfulness, whether she expected anybody to meet her at St. Louis, and whether she would want to go ashore the night we reached it (but he supposed she wouldn't), and cutting many other dry jokes of that nature. There was one little weazen-dried, apple-faced old woman, who took occasion to doubt the constancy of husbands in such circumstances of bereavement; and there was another lady (with a lapdog), old enough to moralize on the lightness of human affections, and yet not so old that she could help nursing the baby now and then, or laughing with the rest when the little woman called it by its father's name, and asked it all manner of fantastic questions concerning him, in the joy of her heart. It was something of a blow to the little woman, that when we were within twenty miles of our destination, it became clearly necessary to put this baby to bed. But she got over it with the same goodhumour, tied a handkerchief round her head, and came out into the little gallery with the rest. Then, such an oracle as she became in reference to the localities! and such facetiousness as was displayed by the married ladies, and such sympathy as was shewn by the single ones, and such peals of laughter as the little woman herself (who would just as soon have cried) greeted every jest with! At last there were the lights of St. Louis, and here was the wharf, and those were the steps; and the little woman, covering her face with her hands, and laughing (or seem ing to laugh) more than ever, ran into her own cabin and shut herself up. I have no doubt that in the charming inconsistency of such excitement, she stopped her ears, lest she should hear "him" asking for her-but I did not see her do it. Then a great crowd of people rushed on board, though the boat was not yet made fast, but was wandering about among the other boats to find a landing-place; and everybody looked for the husband, and nobody saw him, when, in the midst of us all-Heaven knows how she ever got there!—there was the little woman clinging with both arms tight round the neck of a fine, good-looking, sturdy young fellow; and in a moment afterwards there she was again, actually clapping her little hands for joy, as she dragged him through the small door of her small cabin to look at the baby as he lay asleep! Dickens' American Notes. SOCIETY IN BAGDAD. FROM SIR R. KER PORTER'S TRAVELS. [SIR ROBERT KER PORTER, 1775-1842, an English trav eller and author, lived many years in Russia, and published several widely-read volumes of travels in Rus sia, Sweden, Portugal, Spain and the east.] The wives of the higher classes in Bagdad are usually selected from the most beautiful girls that can be obtained from Georgia and Circassia; and, to their natural charms, in like manner with their captive sisters all over the East, they add the fancied embellishments of painted complexions, hands and feet dyed with henna, and their hair and eyebrows stained with the rang, or prepared indigo leaf. Chains of gold, and collars of pearls, with various ornaments of precious stones, decorate the upper part of their persons, while solid bracelets of gold, in shapes resembling serpents, clasp their wrists and ankles. Silver and golden tissued muslins not only form their turbans, but frequently their under-garments. In summer the ample pelisse is made of the most costly shawl, and in cold weather lined and bordered with the choi cest furs. The dress is altogether very becoming; by its easy folds and glittering transparency, shewing a fine shape to advantage, without the immodest exposure of the open vest of the Persian ladies. The humbler females generally move abroad with faces totally unveiled, having a handkerchief rolled round their heads, from beneath which their hair hangs down over their shoulders, while another piece of linen passes under their chin, in the fashion of the Georgians. Their garment is a gown of a shift form, reaching to their ankles, open before, and of a gray colour. Their feet are completely naked. Many of the very inferior classes stain their bosoms with the figures of circles, half-moons, stars, &c. in a bluish stamp. In this barbaric embellishment the poor damsel of Irak-Arabi has one point of vanity resembling that of the ladies of Irak-Ajemi. The former frequently adds this frightful cadaverous hue to her lips; and to complete her savage appearance, thrusts a ring through the right nostril, pendent with a flat button-like ornament set round with blue or red stones. But to return to the ladies of the higher circles, whom we left in some gay saloon of Bagdad. When all are assembled, the evening meal or dinner is soon served. The party, seated in rows, then prepare them |