CHAPTER IV.
DIDO.
The Carthaginian queen has been an eager listener to Æneas's story. She is love-stricken—suddenly, and irremediably. The poet has thought it necessary to explain the fact by the introduction of the god of love himself, whom, in the shape of the young Ascanius, she has been nursing on her bosom. The passion itself is looked upon by the poet—and as we must suppose by his audience—as such a palpable weakness, that even in a woman (and it is to women almost exclusively, in ancient classical fiction, that these sudden affections are attributed) it was thought necessary to account for it by the intervention of some more than human influence. Either human nature has developed, or our modern poets understand its workings better. Shakespeare makes the angry Brabantio accuse the Moor of having stolen his daughter's love
"By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks;"
but Othello himself has a far simpler and more natural explanation of the matter—
