ciated with Italy; and who has interpreted, as no one else has done, the meaning and tendency of his age, and of the change which was then preparing for the human spirit and for the nations of the future.

(1.) The Aeneid brings home to us, in a way in which no other work of Latin literature can do, all those elements in the idea of the destiny, the genius, and character of Rome which most powerfully move the imagination, while it enables us for a time to forget those elements of hardness, unscrupulous injustice, and oppressive domination on which the historian is forced to dwell, and which alienate the sympathies as much as her nobler aspect compels the admiration of mankind. The grandeur and dignity of the Imperial State appear softened and mellowed by Virgil's marvellous art and humane feeling. The Aeneid,' says Hallam, 'reflects the glory of Rome as from a mirror. It remains,' says Mr. Merivale, 'the most complete picture of the national mind at its highest elevation, the most precious document of national history, if the history of an age is revealed in its ideas, no less than in its events and incidents 2.' 'Virgile,' writes M. Sainte-Beuve, 'a été le poëte du Capitole 3. 'Dans ce poëme,' writes M. de Coulanges of the Aeneid,'ils (les Romains) se voyaient, eux, leur fondateur, leur ville, leurs institutions, leurs croyances, leur Empire.' M. Patin again describes the same poem as 'expression de Rome, de Rome entière, de la Rome de tous les temps, de celle des Empereurs, des Consuls, des Rois". He might have added that it had anticipated the idea of the Rome of the Popes, in some at least of its aspects. The type of character which Virgil has conceived in Aeneas is more like that of the milder among the spiritual rulers of mediaeval Rome than that either of the Homeric heroes or of the actual Consuls and Imperators who commanded the Roman armies and administered the affairs of

1 Introduction to the Literature of Europe, Part II. chap. v. 2 Roman Empire, chap. xli.

La Cité antique.

5 Études sur la Poésie latine.

3 Étude sur Virgile.

the Roman State. It has been said of him by another Frenchman that he was more fitted to be the founder of an order of monks than of an Empire. Virgil's object is to make his readers believe in the mission of Rome, as appointed by Divine decree, for the ultimate peace and good government of the world. The work of Rome in the past, the present, and the future is conceived by him as a manifestation of the Deity in his justice, authority, and beneficence.

(2.) The spell which Rome exercises over the imagination is quite distinct from the charm which the thought of Italy has for the hearts of men. The love of Italy was a sentiment as deeply rooted in Virgil's nature as his pride in Rome. This sentiment pervades all his works and inspires some of his noblest poetry. In his pastoral poems, under all the borrowed imagery of the Greek idyl, it reveals itself in his sensibility to the beauty of the Italian climate ('caeli indulgentia'), to the charm of the various seasons, to the distinctive graces of the plants and wild flowers native to the soil, and in the expression of the deep attachment with which the peasant-proprietor clung to his little plot of ground as the sphere alike of his cares and of his happiness. In the Aeneid this patriotic feeling shows itself, as a similar feeling shows itself in the poetry of Scott, in the enthusiasm with which the martial memories of famous towns and tribes are recalled in association with the picturesque features of the land. But by no work of art, ancient or modern, is the complete impression, moral and physical, of the old Italian land and people,—

Terra antiqua potens armis atque ubere glaebae1,

produced with such vivid truthfulness and such enduring charm as by the Georgics. To express the whole meaning of Italy, it was necessary that the poet should feel a pride in her stubborn industry as well as in her warlike energy; that he should

2

1 'A land of old renown, mighty in arms and the richness of its soil.' 2Perseverantissimo agrorum colendorum studio veteres illi Sabini Quirites atavique Romani, etc. Columella.

1

cherish for the whole land, now united as one nation, an impartial love; and that he should be deeply susceptible of that beauty of season and landscape which was a more self-sufficing source of pleasure to the cultivated Italian than even to the ancient Greek. Some sympathy with the 'Itala virtus'—the courage and discipline of the Marsian and other Sabellian races -Ennius had already expressed in his national epic; but he was interested solely in military and political life, in the activity of the camp and battle-field, the forum and senate-house. Virgil was the first and the only Roman poet to realise the full inspiration of that thought, to which he gives utterance in the close of one of his noblest passages, —

Salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus,
Magna virum 2.

(3.) Virgil has also found a truer poetical expression than any other for the political feeling and tendency of his time." He could not indeed teach the whole lesson of the early Empire, or foresee, in the prosperity and glory that followed the battle of Actium, the oppression experienced under the rule of Tiberius, the degradation experienced under Nero. But his imagination was moved by all those influences which, in the Augustan Age, were giving a new impulse and direction to human affairs. His poems, better than any other witnesses, enable us to understand how weary the Roman world was of the wars, disturbances, and anarchy of the preceding century, how ardently it longed for the restoration of order and national unity, how thankfully it accepted the rule of the man who could alone effect this restoration, and how hopefully it looked forward to a new era of peace and prosperity, of glory and empire, under his administration. The poetry of Virgil cooperated with the policy of the Emperor in the work effected in that age. As Augustus professed to give a new organisation

1 Cf. Lucretius, iii. 105-106:

men.'

Quod faciunt nobis annorum tempora, circum
Cum redeunt fetusque ferunt variosque lepores.
Hail mighty mother of harvests, Saturnian land, mighty mother of

to the political life of the Republic, Virgil gave a new direction to its spiritual life, a new significance to its ancient traditions. Augustus, in depriving Rome of her liberty, confirmed for centuries her empire over the world: Virgil, in abnegating the independent position of Lucretius and Catullus, established the ascendency of Roman culture and ideas for a still longer time. As Augustus shaped the policy, Virgil moulded the political feeling of the future. It is in his poems that loyalty to one man, which soon became, and, till a comparatively recent period, continued to be the master-force in European politics,apparently a necessary stage in the ultimate evolution of free national life on a large scale,-finds its earliest expression. And the loyalty of Virgil is not merely a natural emotion towards one who is regarded as the embodiment of law as well as of power, but is a religious acknowledgment of a government, sanctioned and directed by the Divine will. Perhaps one reason why he is read with less sympathy in the present than in previous centuries, is that his political ideal appears to us a lower ideal than that of a free Commonwealth. But in Virgil's time faith in the Republic had become impracticable, and, though the sentiment continued to ennoble the life of individuals, it was powerless to change the current of events. Loyalty to a person appealed to the imagination with the charm of novelty, and might be justified to the conscience of the world, as being, for that time and the times that came after, the necessary bond of civil order and union.

(4.) As Virgil first expressed the political tendency of his age, so he is the purest exponent of its ethical and religious sensibility. He recalls the simpler virtues of the olden time, he represents the humanity of his own age, he anticipates something of the piety and purity of the future faith of the world. As in the development of Roman law, the spirit of equity fostered by Greek studies gradually gained ascendency over the native hardness of the Roman temper, so, from the time of Laelius and the younger Scipio, the expansion through intellectual culture of the humane and sympathetic emotions, ex

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ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS FEELING

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pressed by the word 'humanitas,' continued to prevail, in opposition to the spirit of national exclusiveness habitual to the Roman aristocracy, and in spite of the cruel experience of the Civil Wars. In no writers is this quality more conspicuous than in Cicero and in Lucretius. In Lucretius this feeling inspires his passionate revolt against the ancient religions. The humane feeling of Virgil, on the other hand, is in complete harmony with his religious belief. His word pietas, as is observed by M. Sainte-Beuve, is the equivalent both of our 'piety' and of our 'pity.' The Power above man is regarded

by him not as an unreal phantom created by our fears, but as the source and sanction of justice and mercy, of good will and good faith among men.

6

This view of the relation between the supernatural world and human life is not indeed the only one which Virgil shows us. He endeavours, by the union of imagination, philosophy, and tradition, to establish religious opinion as well as to kindle religious emotions; nor is he quite successful in reconciling these various factors of belief. The Fates,' which are the medium through which man's happiness or misery is allotted, are sometimes stern and inflexible, as well as beneficent in their action. They accomplish their purposes with no regard to individual rights or feelings. But though Virgil failed, as much as other exponents of religious systems, in reconciling the necessities of his creed with the instincts of human sensibility, it remains true that in regard to much both of his feeling and intuition, in his firm faith in Divine Providence, in his conviction of the spiritual essence in man and of its independence of and superiority to the body, in his belief that the future state of the soul depends on the deeds done in the body, in his sense of sin and purification for sin, in the value which he attaches to purity and sanctity of life, his spirit is much more in unison with the faith and hopes which were destined to prevail over the world, than with the common beliefs or half-beliefs of his own time. In his religious and ethical, no less than his political sentiment, 'il a deviné à une heure décisive du monde ce