But, as the poet goes on to say, "Who can cheat the eyes of love?" Dido soon learns his change of purpose, and taxes him openly with his baseness and ingratitude. The whole of this fourth book of the Æneid—"The Passion of Dido," as it has been called—is of a very high order of tragic pathos. The queen is by turns furious and pathetic; now she hurls menaces and curses against her false lover, now she condescends to pitiable entreaty. The Trojan chief's defence, such as it is, is that he had never meant to stay. He is bound, the pilgrim of Heaven, for Latium. His father Anchises is warning him continually in the visions of the night not to linger here: and now the messenger of the gods in person has come to chide this fond delay.
The grand storm of wrath in which the injured queen bursts upon him in reply has severely taxed the powers of all Virgil's English translators. They seem to have felt themselves no more of a match for "the fury of a woman scorned" than Æneas was. Certainly they all fail, more or less, to give the fire and bitterness of the original. The heroics of Dryden suit it better, perhaps, than any other measure:—
"False as thou art, and more than false, forsworn!
Not sprung from noble blood, nor goddess-born,
But hewn from hardened entrails of a rock,
And rough Hyrcanian tigers gave thee suck!
Why should I fawn? what have I worse to fear?
Did he once look, or lend a listening ear,
Sigh when I sobbed, or shed one kindly tear?
All symptoms of a base ungrateful mind—
