e? "_Why I expected_," with a hesitating accent, "_I
expected to see a great deal of water_." This answer set me _then_ into
a fit of laughter, but I have _now_ found out that I am not a whit
wiser than Peggy: for what did I figure to myself that I should find the
Po? only a great deal of water to be sure; and a very great deal of
water it certainly is, and much more, God knows, than I ever saw before,
except between the shores of Calais and Dover; yet I did feel something
like disappointment too; when my imagination wandering over all that the
poets had said about it, and finding earth too little to contain their
fables, recollected that they had thought Eridanus worthy of a place
among the constellations, I wished to see such a river as was worthy all
these praises, and even then, says I,

O'er golden sands let rich Pactolus flow.
And trees weep amber on the banks of Po.

But are we sure after all it was upon the _banks_ these trees, not now
existing, were ever to be found? they grew in the Electrides if I
remember right, and even there Lucian laughingly said, that he spread
his garments in vain to catch the valuable distillation which poetry had
taught him to expect; and Strabo (worse news still!) said that there
were no Electrides neither; so as we knew before--fiction is false: and
had I not discovered it by any other means, I might have recollected a
comical contest enough between a literary lady once, and Doctor Johnson,
to which I was myself a witness;--when she, maintaining the happiness
and purity of a country life and rural manners, with her best eloquence,
and she had a great deal; added as corroborative and almost
incontestable authority, that the _Poets_ said so: "and didst thou not
know then," replied he, my darling dear, that the _Poets lye_?

When they tell us, however, that great rivers have horns, which twisted
off become cornua copiae, dispensing pleasure and plenty, they entertain
us it must be confessed; and never was allegory more nearly allied with
truth, than in the lines of Virgil;

Gemina auratus taurino cornua vultu,
Eridanus, quo non alius per pinguia culta,
In mare purpureuin violentior influit amnis[U];

[Footnote U:
Whence bull-fac'd, so adorn'd with gilded horns,
Than whom no river through such level meads,
Down to the sea in swifter torrents speeds.
]

so accurately translated by Doctor Warton, who would not reject the
epithet _bull-faced_, becau