which had been digested by Aristotle, and the various observations made on the writings of the Greek bard by critics of acuteness and taste; amongst the chief of whom was his friend Horace, who remarks that
————quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.—De Arte Poet.
E’en sometimes the good Homer naps.
Virgil, besides, composed his poem in a state remote from indigence, where he was roused to exertion by the example of several contemporary poets; and what must have animated him beyond every other consideration, he wrote both at the desire, and under the patronage of the emperor and his minister Mecaenas. In what time Homer composed either of his poems, we know not; but the Aeneid, we are informed, was the employment of Virgil during eleven years. For some years, the repeated entreaties of Augustus could not extort from him the smallest specimen of the work; but at length, when considerably advanced in it, he condescended to recite three books—the second, the fourth, and the sixth—in the presence of the