how the shades all crowd eagerly to the boat-side praying for admission, and how the grisly ferryman drives some back with his oar. It is a sad thought to the hero; for amongst the rejected he sees some of his own companions who had perished in the storm off the coast of Carthage. Among them, too, he sees the figure of his late pilot Palinurus, who tells him the story of his unhappy fate; how, after all, he was not drowned, but, clinging to the piece of rudder which had broken away with him, had drifted three days and nights upon the waves, and had at last swam ashore on the fated coast of Italy. There the cruel natives had attacked and killed him, as he struggled up the cliffs; and now his corpse lies tossed to and fro amid the breakers in the harbour of Velia. He prays of his leader either to sail back there and to
"Give him a little earth for charity;"
or, by his influence with these Powers below, to get the law of exclusion relaxed in his favour. This last request the Sibyl rebukes at once, as utterly inorthodox and heretical; but comforts him at the same time with the assurance that the barbarous natives shall be plagued by heaven for their abominable deed, nor shall they find deliverance until they solemnly propitiate his shade by the erection of a mound and the establishment of funeral honours, and call the spot by the name of Palinurus—which name, the Sibyl declares, shall endure there for ever. The oracular voice in this case was not deceitful: the place, or supposed place, is still called "Punta di Palinuro." Virgil's
