not be so hurriedly dispatched. He showed how the old historians had
gone back to Troy for the beginnings of the English race, and had
chosen a great-grandson of Æneas, named Brutus, as the one by whom it
should be attached to the right royal heroes of Homer's poem. Thus we
see how firm a hold upon the imagination of the world the tale of Troy
had after twenty-seven hundred years.

Twenty-five or thirty years before the birth of Christ there was in
Rome another poet, named Virgil, writing about the wanderings of Æneas.
He began his beautiful story with these words: "Arms I sing, and the
hero, who first, exiled by fate, came from the coast of Troy to Italy
and the Lavinian shore." He then went on to tell in beautiful words the
story of the wanderings of his hero,--a tale that has now been read and
re-read for nearly two thousand years, by all who have wished to call
themselves educated; generations of school-boys, and schoolgirls too,
have slowly made their way through the Latin of its twelve books. This
was another evidence of the strong hold that the story of Troy had upon
men, as well as of the honor in which the heroes, and descent from
them, were held.

In the generation after Virgil there arose a graphic writer named Livy,
who wrote a long history of Rome, a large portion of which has been
preserved to our own day. Like Virgil, Livy traced the origin of the
Latin people to Æneas, and like Milton, he re-told the ancient stories,
saying that he had no intention of affirming or refuting the traditions
that had come down to his time of what had occurred before the building
of the city, though he thought them rather suitable for the fictions of
poetry than for the genuine records of the historian. He added, that it
was an indulgence conceded to antiquity to blend human things with
things divine, in such a way as to make the origin of cities appear