How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages with delight!of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, or harder-working mantua-maker) after her long day's needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents!

Now it was a barefooted friar to be watched for at Mantua, coming with powers plenipotentiary from his Holiness over all the prelates of the rebellious realm; or it might be this same friar, in lay disguise, still armed with those ghostly and secret powers, for whom the trusted servants of Venice were to be on guard.

I MANTUA DIVES AVIS II SCHOOL AND WAR III

THE AENEID VERGIL I MANTUA DIVES AVIS

Vergilius is a good Italic nomen found in all parts of the peninsula, but Latin names came as a matter of course with the gift of citizenship or of the Latin status, and Mantua with the rest of Cisalpine Gaul had received the Latin status nineteen years before Vergil's birth.

[Footnote 1: Braunholz, The Nationality of Vergil, Classical Review, 1915, 104 ff.] Vergil himself, a good antiquarian, assures us that in the heroic age Mantua was chiefly Etruscan with enclaves of two other peoples (presumably Umbrians and Venetians).

In this he is doubtless following a fairly reliable tradition, accepted all the more willingly because of his intimacy with Maecenas, who was of course Etruscan: Mantua dives avis, sed non genus omnibus unum, Gens illis triplex, populi sub gente quaterni, Ipsa caput populis; Tusco de sanguine vires.

Pliny seems to have supposed this passage a description of Mantua in Vergil's own day: Mantua Tuscorum trans Padum sola reliqua (III. 130).

Pliny seems to have supposed this passage a description of Mantua in Vergil's own day: Mantua Tuscorum trans Padum sola reliqua (III. 130).

If this be true, the open country of Mantua must have had but few survivors.

Mantua indeed, a "Latin" town after 89 B.C., did not become a Roman municipality until after Vergil had left it, but Vergil's father, according to the eighth Catalepton, had earlier in his life lived in Cremona.

Cities like Cremona and Mantua were truer guardians of the puritanic ideals of Cato's day than Rome itself.

The first note of fear is found in his eighth Catalepton: Villula, quae Sironis eras, et pauper agelle, Verum illi domino tu quoque divitiae, Me tibi et hos una mecum, quos semper amavi, Si quid de patria tristius audiero, Commendo imprimisque patrem: tu nunc eris illi Mantua quod fuerat quodque Cremona prius.

The lack of realistic local color in these pastorals has frequently been criticized, on the supposition that Vergil wrote them while at home in Mantua, and ought, therefore, to have given true pictures of Mantuan scenery and characters.

It is doubtful whether Vergil ever again saw Mantua after leaving it for Cremona in his early boyhood.

With regard to Alfenus and Gallus, the scholiasts remained somewhat nearer the truth, for they had at hand a speech of Callus criticizing the former for his behavior at Mantua.

Vergil, of course, recognizes Alfenus' position as commissioner in his ninth Eclogue where he promises him great glory if he will show mercy to Mantua: Vare, tuum nomen, superet modo Mantua nobis ...

In such conditions we can realize that Gallus was, as a matter of course, interested in saving Mantua from confiscation, and that in this effort he may well have appealed to Octavian in Vergil's behalf.

The landmark of the low hills and the beeches up to which the property was saved (IX.8) seems to be the limits of Mantua's boundaries, not of Vergil's estates on the low river-plains.

The setting is once more that of the country about Naples, of the Campanian hills and the sea coast, not that of Mantua.

References to Aeneas crop out here and there in the Georgics, and the mysterious address to Mantua in the third book promises, under allusive metaphors, an epic of Trojan heroes.

A recent study of "trees, shrubs and plants of Vergil," illuminating in numberless details, has fallen into the same error here and there by failing to notice that Vergil wrote his Bucolics and Georgics not near Mantua but in southern Italy.

I immediately dispatched a Hue and Cry after her to the Change, to her Mantua-maker, and to the young Ladies that Visit her; but after above an Hours search she returned of herself, having been taking a Walk, as she told me, by Rosamond's Pond.

In Conference with my Mantua-Maker.

And so Miss Jones, the mantua-maker, Has let her cottage on the hill?