§ 1] ESTIMATE AT AND SINCE THE RENAISSANCE 67

the works of poets, scholars, and men of letters in that age. Ninety editions of his works are said to have been published before the year 15001. From Italy this influence passed to France and England, and was felt, not by scholars and critics only, but by the great poets and essayists, the orators and statesmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was discussed as an open question whether the Iliad or the Aeneid was the greater epic poem: and it was then necessary for the admirers of the Greek rather than of the Latin poet to assume an apologetic tone. Scaliger ranked Virgil above Homer and Theocritus. His prestige was greatest during the century of French ascendency in modern literature, that, namely, between the age of Milton and that of Lessing. The chief critical lawgiver in that century was Voltaire, and no great critic has ever expressed a livelier admiration of any poem than he has of the Aeneid. It is to him we owe the saying, 'Homère a fait Virgile, dit-on; si cela est, c'est sans doute son plus bel ouvrage.' He claims elsewhere for the second, fourth, and sixth books of the Aeneid a great superiority over the works of all Greek poets. He says also that the Aeneid is the finest monument remaining from antiquity. As Spenser was called the 'poet's poet,' so Virgil might be called the orator's poet. Even by a rhetorician of the second century the question was discussed whether Virgil was more a poet or an orator 5. Bossuet is said to have known his works by heart. In the great era of English oratory, no author seems to have been so familiarly known or was so often quoted. We read in a recent sketch of the life of Burke', 'Most writers have constantly beside them some favourite classical author, from whom they

1 Mr. Small, in his account of the writings of Bishop Gavin Douglas, says, 'The works of Virgil passed through ninety editions before the year 1500.'

See Conington's Introduction to the Aeneid.

3 Appendix to the Henriade.

4 Dict. Philos., art. Epopée.

5

Quoted by Comparetti.

6 Sainte-Beuve, 'Causeries du Lundi.'

By Mr. Payne, in the Clarendon Press Series.

endeavour to take their prevailing tone. . . . Burke, according to Butler, always had a ragged Delphin Virgil not far from his elbow.' A vestige of the attraction which his words had for an older school of English politicians may be traced in the survival of Virgilian quotation in some of the parliamentary warfare of recent times. The important place which Virgil has filled in the teaching of our public schools-the great nurses of our classic statesmen—has perhaps not been without some influence in shaping our national history 1. It would be no exaggeration to say that the poems of Virgil, and especially the Aeneid, have contributed more than any other works of art in modern times, not only to stamp the impression of ancient Rome on the imagination, but to educate the sensibility to generous emotion as well as to literary beauty. There is probably no author, even at the present day, of whom some knowledge may be with more certainty assumed among cultivated people of every nation.

II.

This unbroken ascendency of eighteen centuries, which might almost be described in the words applied by Lucretius to the ascendency of Homer

Adde Heliconiadum comites; quorum unus Homerus
Sceptra potitus 2—

is as great a fortune as that which has fallen to the lot of any writer. If any one ever succeeded in securing that which

'Who shall say what share the turning over and over in their mind, and masticating, so to speak, in early life as models of their Latin verse, such things as Virgil's

or Horace's

Disce, puer, virtutem ex me, verumque laborem,

Fortuna saevo laeta negotio,

has not had in forming the high spirit of the upper class in France and England, the two countries where Latin verse has most ruled the schools, and the two countries which most have had, or have, a high upper class and a high upper class spirit?' High Schools and Universities in Germany, by M. Arnold.

2Add too the companions of the Muses of Helicon, amongst whom Homer, the peerless, after holding the sceptre-.'

69

Tacitus says 'should be to a man the one object of an insatiable ambition,' to leave after him a happy memory of himself',' that may be truly said of Virgil. Though his name may henceforth be less famous, it cannot be deprived of its lustre in the past. Nor does it seem possible that this reputation could have been maintained so long, in different ages and nations, without some catholic excellence, depending on original gifts as well as trained accomplishment, which could unite so many diversely-constituted minds of the highest capacity in a common sentiment of veneration. The secret of his long ascendency is, in the words of Sainte-Beuve, that he gave a new direction to taste, to the passions, to sensibility: he divined at a critical period of the world's history what the future would love.'

It is only in the present century that the question has been asked whether this great reputation was deserved. But the earliest witness who might be called against his claims to this high distinction is Virgil himself. In the Eclogues and Georgics the delight which he finds in the exercise of his art is qualified by a sense of humility, arising from a feeling of some want of elevation in his subject. In his last hours he desired that the Aeneid should be burned: and that this was not a mere impulse arising from the depression of illness may be inferred from the request which he made to Varius, before leaving Italy, 'that if anything happened to him he should destroy the Aeneid.' A letter written to Augustus is quoted by Macrobius, in which Virgil speaks of himself as having undertaken a work of such vast compass almost from a perversion of mind 2. No poet could well be animated by a loftier ambition than Virgil; yet few great poets seem to have been so little satisfied with their own success. It was not in his nature to feel or express the confident sense of superiority which sustained Ennius and Lucretius in their self-appointed tasks, nor even that satisfaction with the work he had done and that assurance of an abiding place in the memory of men which relieve the ironical selfdisparagement of Horace.

1 Tac. Ann. iv. 38.

2 i. 24. II.

The most obvious explanation of this passionate and pathetic desire that the work to which he had given eleven years of his maturest power should not survive him, is the unfinished state, in respect of style, in which the poem was left. He had set aside three years for the final revision of the work and the removal of those temporary 'make-shifts,' which had been originally inserted with full knowledge of their inadequacy, in order not to check the ardour of composition. After having devoted three years of his youth to the execution of a work so slight in purpose and so small in compass as the Eclogues, he might well feel depressed by the thought that a work of such high purpose and so vast a scope as the Aeneid-and a work of which such expectations as those expressed by Propertius were entertained-should be given to the world before receiving the final touch of the master's hand.

Yet the words in the letter to Augustus, that I fancy myself to have been almost under the influence of some fatuity in engaging on so great a work'—if they are to be taken as a true expression of his feeling, imply a deeper ground of dissatisfaction with his undertaking. Horace, in the estimate which he forms of his own work, seems to maintain the due balance between the self-assertion and the modesty of genius. But his modesty arises from his thorough self-knowledge, and from his understanding the limits within which a complete success was attainable by him. That of Virgil seems to be a weakness incidental to his greatest gifts, his sense of perfection, his appreciation of every kind of excellence. His large appreciation of the genius of others, from the oldest Greek to the latest Latin poet, his regard for the authority of the past, his attitude of a scholar in many schools, his willing acceptance of Homer as his guide through all the unfamiliar region of heroic adventure, were scarcely compatible with the buoyant spirit, as of some discoverer of unknown lands, which was needed to support him in an enterprise so arduous and so long-sustained as the composition of a great literary epic. The task which he set himself required of him to combine into one harmonious work of art,

which at the same time should bear the stamp of originality,— of being a new thing in the world,-the characteristics and excellences of various minds belonging to various times. With such aims it was scarcely possible that the actual execution of his work should not fall below his ideal of perfection. Especially must he have recognised his own deficiency in the pure epic impulse, which apparently sustained Homer without conscious effort. He could not feel or make others feel the culminating interest in the combat between Turnus and Aeneas, which Homer feels and makes others feel in the combat between Hector and Achilles. In his earlier national poem he had vindicated the glory of the ploughshare in opposition to the glory of the sword; and, in his later battle-pieces, he must have felt his immeasurable inferiority to the poet of the Iliad. And yet neither the precedents of epic poetry nor his purpose of celebrating the national glory of Rome permitted him to leave this part of his task unattempted. To describe a battle or a single combat in the spirit and with the fellow-feeling of Homer has been granted to no poet since his time. Among modern poets perhaps Scott has approached nearer to him than any other. Among Roman authors, Ennius, who gained distinction as a soldier before he became known as a writer, was more fitted to succeed in such an attempt than the poet whose earliest love was for the fields and woods and running streams among the valleys.'

As the comparison of his own epic poem with the greatest of the Greek epics is the probable explanation of Virgil's own dissatisfaction with the Aeneid, so it is the cause of the adverse criticism to which the poem has been exposed in recent times. Of these adverse criticisms, that expressed by Niebuhr, both in his History of Rome and in his Historical Lectures, was among the earliest. In the former he expresses his belief that Virgil, at the approach of death, wished to destroy what in those solemn moments he could not but view with sadness, as the groundwork of a false reputation'.' In the latter he says, ' The 1 Vol. i. p. 197, Hare and Thirlwall's translation.