e of Manchester or
Ashton glooms over the dens of torture in which withered and debauched
children are forced to their labour, and the foul haunts under the
shelter of which desperate men hatch plots of rapine and slaughter.

The poem shows that the Romans, like the English of those days,
celebrated the season by betaking themselves to the woods throughout the
night, where they kept a vigil in honour of Venus, to whose guardianship
the month of April was assigned, as being the universal generating and
producing power, and more especially to be adored as such by the Romans,
from having been, through her son AEneas, the author of their race. The
poem seems to have been composed with a view to its being sung by a
choir of maidens in their nocturnal rambles beneath the soft light of an
Italian moon. The delicious balm of that voluptuous climate breathes
through every line of it, and vividly presents to the reader's
imagination the scene of the festivity; but whether we can claim these
celebrations for our own May-day, is a doubtful point; for Wernsdorf,
who has included the Pervigilium Veneris in his edition of _Poetae Latini
Minores_, vol. iii., maintains that it is to be referred to the
Veneralia, or feast of Venus, on the 1st of April. The Kalendar of
Constantius marks the 3d day of April as Natalis Quirini. If, then, the
morrow spoken of in the poem is to be taken to mean this birthday of
Romulus, we must suppose the vigil of three nights to have begun on the
night of the last day of March. But perhaps our readers will agree with
us, that there are quite as good grounds for attributing this vigil to
the Floralia, which commenced on the 27th of April, and ended on the
first of May. For although the rites of the Floralia were in honour of
Flora, yet we may easily conceive the principle by which the worship of
Venus, the spirit of beauty, and love, and production, would come to be
intermingled with the homage paid to the flower-goddess. And then the
three nights would denote the nights of the Floralia already past, if we
suppose the hymn to have been sung on the night before the 1st of May.
This seems more natural, as coinciding with the known length of the
festival, than Wernsdorf's hypothesis, which makes the vigil commence
before the month of Venus had opened. As regards the time of year, too,
May is far more suited than April, even in Italy, for outwatching the
Bear on woodland lawns.

The question regarding the autho