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162 the morning as fiercely as ever. But succours are on their way. The ships of the Etruscan leader Tarchon—the name which future kings of Rome were to bear with little alteration—have been sailing all night down the Tyrrhenian Sea, under their new-found chief Æneas. His galley leads the van; and with him in the stern—for he takes the helm himself—sits young Pallas, hearing him tell of the great deeds of old. The poet gives us something like a muster-roll of the Etruscan chiefs and their followings; more interesting perhaps to the ear of a Roman, who would catch up here and there some historical allusion to a place or family with which he claimed some connection, than to the modern reader, who can have no such sympathies. He gives us, too, the figure-heads from which the ships of the most noted captains took their names: the Tiger—a favourite, it would seem, to our English nautical taste even down to the present day—the Centaur, the Apollo, the Triton, the Mincius—the last-named from the river that flowed by Virgil's own town of Mantua,—

Fair town! her sons of high degree,

Though not unmixed their blood;

Three races swell the mingled stream:

Four states from each derive their birth:

Herself among them sits supreme,

Her Tuscan blood her chiefest worth."

Æneas has a strange rencontre in his night-voyage. Suddenly there rises round his galley a circle of water-nymphs—they are his own vessels, thus transformed, and their errand is to warn him of the danger in which