text:  It has been so long the fashion to represent Virgil as the sole master of the pathetic that this assertion may appear to many paradoxical; and it is undoubtedly true that the fourth book of the Aeneid cannot he read by any one of common sensibility without strong emotion; but how different is the lamentation of Andromache over her living husband uttered in all the glow and consciousness of returned and "twice blest" love from the raving of the slighted woman abandoned by the lover whom she has too rashly trusted and to whom she has too plainly become indifferent! How different is the character of the patriot warrior the prop and bulwark of his country sacrificing his life to delay that ruin which he knew it was beyond his power to avert--snatching amid the bloody scenes around him a moment for the indulgence of a father's pride and a husband's tenderness from the perfidious paramour flying from the vengeance of the woman he had wronged! And how noble is the simplicity of Andromache how affecting the appeal in which after reminding her husband that all else to which she was bound had been swept away she tells him that while he remains her other losses are unfelt! Let us trace the episode