the Eneid, which, as a narrative conducted through many successive days, would naturally require the morning to be frequently introduced, it occurs, I believe, only eleven times, which is at the rate of less than once in each book. The particular allusion or description extends to the length of two lines only in two instances, and in three cases the same identical line is repeated. Three times does he repeat

Titheni croceum linguens Aurora cubile.

This is a very plain and concise allusion to an old story, of Aurora being enamoured of a Trojan prince, Tithonus. Virgil seems to have been very fond of this image, in which, I must acknowledge, I cannot discover either much propriety or beauty. It seems with him a sort of technical or customary description of the morning, always proper, and always at hand, when he was too lazy or too barren for any other picture. By the way, it is a literal translation from Homer.

In the following passage he makes an allusion to another mythological story.

Nonamque serena Auroram Phaetonthis equi jam luce vehe

bant.

This passage contains nothing properly characteristic or descriptive of the morning.

The ancients were much accustomed to consider the sun as a deity, riding in, or rather driving a chariot, with sometimes two and sometimes four horses. The tale of Phaeton, which is founded upon this belief, is well known. Virgil, like the other poets of his age and nation, naturally fell into this allusion, as in the following lines:

Cælo

Puniceis invecta rotis Aurora rubebat.

Ethere ab alto Aurora in roseis fulgebat lutea bigis.

The following is the only passage I have met with in which the morning is described, not with its physical, but its moral accompaniments. Sad, however, and strangely gloomy is the garb in which the pensive poet has arrayed her. He views the dawn of day, not as the rural or picturesque enthusiast, who is enchanted with its tints, or animated with its cheerful promises, but like the busy or slavish classes of mankind, to whom each rising day only brings a renewal of labour and of care.

Aurora interia miseris mortalibus almam Extulerat lucem referens opera atque labores.

Virgil will, I think, appear not to have shone very eminently in this department of poetical description. Many of our English poets, and principally Spenser and Shakespeare, have described the morning

in colours and with circumstances far more picturesque, splendid, various, and rich, than any of the Greek or Roman poets.

CRITO.

For the Literary Magazine.

FALSE WIT.

AS nothing occurs oftener in conversation than puns, so nothing seems to be oftener commented on by the writers of short essays and scraps. One would think nothing new could be said upon punning, and yet I cannot help encountering the hazard of saying trite and tedious things, by once more putting pen to paper, from the impulse which has been given to my thoughts by a punning epitaph, written by one of my friends, and which appears to me no contemptible performance in that style.

A poetical dyer (not Dyer the poet) is supposed to dedicate the following doleful stanzas to his deceased wife.

My wife has died and gone to dust,
The thing is strange to me;

Yet not a soul alive, I trust,
E'er dyed so much as she.

To dye, indeed, was all her pride,

For threescore years and four: She dyed each day she lived, and died When she could live no more.

When she grew old, I know not why,
Her dyeing days were past,
And so, for want of cloth to dye,
She died herself at last.

Aristotle is said to have taken great pains in dividing into genera and species the tribe of verbal witticisms, and Dean Swift did not disdain to employ his time in manufacturing clinches, conundrums, and puns, of all possible kinds and sorts. I hope I may not be severely cen

sured for venturing to enquire, of those who have nothing better to attend to, to what genus or species the following is to be referred.

The celebrated Radcliff, in his early days, and before his practice enabled him to keep a horse, was met by a rival physician, who was extremely well mounted, and who was very proud of his steed. A friend of Radcliff's, who met him at the same instant, pointing to the horse, observed, "Is not that a very fine horse, doctor?” "Aye, aye, replied the other, sneeringly, "he may pass for a tolerably horse-doctor."

If y f you will allow me to trifle a little longer, I will add another specimen of the same kind.

Says Will to Tom, the other day,

As I was loitering in a lane Down by the shore, I saw a house

Fly through a window's broken pane. Tush, man, a stranger sight than that I met this morning, Tom replied: I swear I saw a winged horse

Fly o'er a river three miles wide.

Now, my grave reader, what think you? Believe or not, they both said true.

For the Literary Magazine.

ON THE FLAVIAN AMPHITHEATRE AT ROME.

From a Manuscript Journal.

WITH my peculiar taste, you will not wonder that the greatest objects of my curiosity in Romo were the Flavian amphitheatre and St. Peter's church. These are the greatest structures, in every point of view, which the world contains, and both evince the power and wealth of an imperial people.

Think not that I am going to give you a description of these stupendous monuments of art, power, and riches; for nobody could give an

tary exhibitions, can only be viewed by a vast number, or even by a small number of spectators, from a succession of gradually ascending seats, like those of the Roman theatres and amphitheatres.

Fontana rails at the homely and unsightly aspect of a great multitude standing or sitting on a plane. The grandest part of a spectacle, he says, is formed by the spectators themselves. In this he is doubtless in the right. It is impossible for any sublunary show to equal the variety and grandeur of one formed by a hundred thousand living and animated human faces, ranged in one convenient view. In the modern fashion, the multitude can only be seen from an elevated station, and even then with much less advantage than in the amphitheatrical order. To see the preacher, or orator, or actor, they must turn their eyes upward, in a painful and incommodious posture.

To reconcile the convenience of the amphitheatre with the formalities and modes of the Roman worship, Fontana proposed to erect a magnificent church at one end of the arena, whose plan and embellishments might easily be made to coincide with the principles of the original structure. This church would serve the purpose only of a more complete or complicated rostrum or stage, for exhibiting those awful pantomimes, which constitute the Roman worship, the ceremonies of the papal inauguration, and the great festivals of christmas and the jubilee.

For my part, I admire inexpressibly these ideas of Fontana. Instead of raising an enormous temple from the ground, composed, in no small degree, of combustible materials, and raised to a great height indeed, but comparatively on a tottering foundation, how much better would the same talents, power, and riches have been employed, in restoring and embellishing the amphitheatre, and augmenting it according to Fontana's plan! To effect

this would have required but a small portion of the wealth expended in the Templum Vaticanum, and thus the imperial genius of Rome would have still continued to hover over the same favourite and august spot.

What a topic of sublime reflection would the traveller have enjoyed, in beholding this vast structure filled with a concourse of nations, from all parts of the christian world, drawn thither by devotion or curiosity; the arena occupied with numerous processions; and the gallery of the church, at one end, the scene of some splendid and solemn rite! Nothing to be found in the actual state of Rome is worthy of comparison with such a spectacle.

How much must the man of taste regret, that the wanton violence and havoc of lawless hands has defaced and overturned so much of this structure. All that was required to its preservation was to let it alone. Nothing would have vanished but a few beams and boards, easily renewed.

Even all the minuter sculptures and mosaics would have remained entire, and every considerable expence been rendered needless. Now it is only a monstrous and cumbrous ruin; and, since it can never be restored, the only proper use of its remains is to contribute to the building of houses, and the paving of streets, in the neighbourhood. At present it is, at least to me, an object more of painful than of pleasurable contemplation.

For the Literary Magazine.

DON QUIXOTE.

DR. WARTON, in his Essay on Pope, observes, that the dialogue in the Essay on Criticism, between the poet and the mad knight, is not taken from the Don Quixote of Cervantes, but from one that is commonly called a continuation of it, and which was, in fact, written

after the publication of the first part, and before the second part appear ed. For this reason, and some others, this performance, though inferior to the work of Cervantes, deserves more attention than is usually given to it. It is said to have been written by a person named Alonso Fernandes d'Avellanada; but this is supposed to be a fictitious name. This book was translated into French by Le Sage, a proof that he thought it not destitute of merit: there is likewise an English version, by one Baker; and Cervantes himself alludes to it, several times, in the second part of his own Don Quixote, particularly in chapters LIX and LXXII. One circumstance, indeed, renders this book a literary curiosity: the great probability that it caused Cervantes to make his Don Quixote a different character, in his second part, from what he was in the first. In the first part, it is true, he is not drawn as an absolute maniac, when not discoursing of knight errantry; but all his conversation is tinged with singularity, and the pertinent things he says are incoherently arranged, and out of place, as his long speech to the goat-herds on the golden age; but, in the second part, he is made a man of sound judgment, and elegant literature, when the subject of his madness is not immediately touched on. Now this seems to have risen from a desire of Cervantes to show he could, in every mode of writing, excel his rival, who had made the character of his Don Quixote a vehicle to convey his own learning to the public, a circumstance, of which the passage quoted by Pope is a striking instance. Cervantes would not, perhaps, have ever written a second part, had he not been provoked to it, by finding the subject taken out of his hands, by one so much inferior in the art of writing; and he certainly killed his hero at last, for the same reason which moved Addison to slay his sir Roger de Coverly, that he might not be made a fool of, by getting into other hands.

For the Literary Magazine.

SOME ACCOUNT OF THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP.

IN relation to human purposes, this singular swamp justly deserves the expressive name commonly given to it, that of wilderness or dismal, no condition of the earth's surface being more wild and irreclaimable than this. It is scarcely possible to penetrate or pass through it. The foot, at every step, sinks not less than twelve or fifteen inches deep into the soil. The trees are generally small; they grow very thick together, and the undergrowth or shrubbery is so luxuriant, and composed of such tenacious, perplexing, and thorny wood, that the sight is bounded to a few feet, the flesh wounded and torn at every point, and a path only to be made by the incessant use of the hatchet. The stinging insects are likewise innumerable, and extremely venomous, and the exhalations fatal to human life. On the whole, it would be difficult to imagine a situation on this globe less suitable for human habitation and subsistence than an Ameri

can DISMAL.

Yet the very circumstances that make it unsuitable for man, are those which produce an incredible abundance of vegetable and animal life. Not only the surface is covered with branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit, to such a degree that the sight cannot extend a foot beyond the eye, and the hand cannot be thrust forward an inch without encountering opposition, but the soil itself, to the depth of fifteen or twenty feet, is one closely woven mass of vegetable fibres. A sharp stake can be thrust down by the hand to that depth, through a mossy, spungy, yielding mass, which, on the withdrawing of the foot or staff, instantly resumes its place, so as to leave no trace visible.

The following particulars, respecting one of these swamps, are furnished by an intelligent person, whose calling is that of a surveyor,