40 RE MA RKS on feme P off ages of 



daughters they were, facrifice was occafionally performed. 

 Ovid fays indeed, that they relented on hearing the fong of 

 Orpheus, but allures us it was for the firft time. Virgil, in 

 his account of that affair, fays only, that they were aftonifhed. 



Here I cannot but remark how abfurd it is for us to begin 

 an epitaph with the words Dis Manibus, or the letters D. M. 

 which oftener than once I have feen on a modern tombftone. 

 Such an exordium may be claffical ; but, in a Chriftian church- 

 yard, an invocation to Proferpine would not be more incongru- 

 ous. Addison did well, when he advifed the writers of his 

 time not to facrifice their catechifm to their poetry. 



I said, that the Manes feem to have had nothing to do in 

 Tartarus. I am not ignorant, however, that Rue us and the 

 common Dictionaries affirm, that the word fometimes denotes 

 the furies, and quote as an authority, " Ignofcenda quidem, 

 •" fcirent fi ignofcere manes." But this is not fufficient autho- 

 rity. That verfe of Virgil relates to Orpheus looking behind 

 him, when conducting his wife to the upper world ', a fault, or 

 infatuation, which was to be punifhed, not by the fcourge of 

 the furies, but by calling back Eurydice to the {hades below ; 

 and which the Manes, however placable, could not pardon, 

 becaufe it was a direct violation of the treaty with Profer- 

 pine. 



It is fomewhat difficult to underfland diflinctly what the 

 ancients meant by the words amma, umbra, fimulacra y which, 

 in this difcourfe, I call ghojls, jhades or fouls. We know, that 

 man confifts of a body and a foul, a material and an incorpo- 

 real part ; the one, like all other bodies, inactive, the other the 

 fource of life, motion and intelligence. But, on comparing 

 the general doctrine of this fixth book with a paffage in the 

 fourth Georgic, and with the eleventh of the Odyfley, we find, 

 that our poet, following in part the opinions of Pythagoras 

 and Plato, and partly too the reprefentations of Homer, fup- 

 pofed man to confift of three fubftances ; Jirf, a vital and ac- 

 tive 



