Conington, after duly reporting that this is a solitary instance in Virgil of a hemistich where the sense is incomplete, concludes a lengthy comment as follows: ‘On the whole, there seems no good reason to doubt that we have the passage as Virgil left it. If we cannot complete the hemistich satisfactorily, we may console ourselves with thinking that he could not either.’ But why should we be so ready to limit the poetic invention of Virgil? Have we learnt nothing from ‘sic uos non uobis’? Consider the situation. Andromache has met Aeneas unexpectedly, and asks about his son Ascanius. ‘Is he still alive?’ The question brings back to her mind the terrible fate of her own son, Astyanax, and her emotion chokes her. Virgil could not complete the line, because its speaker could not.

In the Classical Review of March 1957 a request was made that some New Zealand scholar would confirm and amplify for future editors of Pliny, H.N. ix. 24 ff., and Pliny, Ep. ix. 33, a brief report printed in The Times of 10 March 1956 about a dolphin ‘which allowed children at the Opononi beach to ride on its back … frolicked among the bathers in the shallow water and balanced balls on its nose’. I record most gratefully the substance of two replies to this request, one from Mr. L. G. Pocock, formerly (1928–55) Professor of Classics in Canterbury University College; and the other from Professor H. A. Murray, M.A., F.R.N.S., N.Z., of the Victoria University of Wellington. I am further indebted to Mr. Pocock for obtaining the photographs reproduced in this number of Greece & Rome (Plate V). They were taken by Mr. Eric Lee-Johnson, (Box 5, Waimamaku, Hokianga, N.Z.), who has most generously waived reproduction fees, on condition that none of the prints is handed on for reproduction elsewhere.

In 1695, in the last decade of his literary activity, Dryden borrowed (as he tells us) two months from his Virgil, and published a prose translation of the Latin poem De Arte Graphicâ by the Frenchman, Charles Dufresnoy; and to it he prefixed his well-known essay, ‘A Parallel betwixt Painting and Poetry’. Among Dryden's critical writings, this may justly be regarded as the worst. Here Swift's jibe about the Prefaces seems to be justified—how they were

meerly writ at first for filling,

To raise the Volume's Price, a Shilling.