stimulating the imagination, and swaying it with the feelings of pity
and terror in a way to make us regret that he wrote no others in a
similar vein. We find ourselves at midnight in the gardens of the
sorceress Canidia, whither a boy of good family--his rank being
clearly indicated by the reference to his purple _toga_ and
_bulla_--has been carried off from his home. His terrified
exclamations, with which the poem opens, as Canidia and her three
assistants surround him, glaring on him, with looks significant of
their deadly purpose, through lurid flames fed with the usual ghastly
ingredients of a witch's fire, carry us at once into the horrors of
the scene. While one of the hags sprinkles her hell-drops through the
adjoining house, another is casting up earth from a pit, in which the
boy is presently imbedded to the chin, and killed by a frightful
process of slow torture, in order that a love philtre of irresistible
power may be concocted from his liver and spleen. The time, the place,
the actors are brought before us with singular dramatic power.
Canidia's burst of wonder and rage that the spells she deemed all-
powerful have been counteracted by some sorceress of skill superior to
her own, gives great reality to the scene; and the curses of the dying
boy, launched with tragic vigour, and closing with a touch of
beautiful pathos, bring it to an effective close.

The speculations as to who and what Canidia was, in which scholars
have run riot, are conspicuous for absurdity, even among the wild and
ridiculous conjectures as to the personages named by Horace in which
the commentators have indulged. That some well-known person was the
original of Canidia is extremely probable, for professors of
witchcraft abounded at the time, combining very frequently, like their
modern successors, the arts of Medea with the attributes of Dame
Quickly. What more natural than for a young poet to work up an