tantalizing fragments by Frederic Myers,1 which have seemed to more readers than one to reach the highwater mark of Virgilian translation. I trust it may be admitted that we have here the work of a true poet and true lover of Virgil, a thing that has ill deserved more than two centuries of oblivion. It should be noted that Fanshawe was the first poet of his century-and indeed, I believe, the last-to use the Spenserian stanza, a metre for which the age of Dryden had no liking, and for which Dryden's own epithet is unfortunate.'

My debt is great to Mr. Mackail, who introduced me both to the poet and to his biographer. As long ago as 1888 Mr. Mackail had discovered and written upon the subject in Macmillan's Magazine, and his charming paper in vol. xxviii. of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature is one that could hardly have come from any other hand.

The present edition is printed from that of 1676, which alone I possess. I have compared it with the earlier volumes, and the differences, apart from spelling, are insignificant. English orthography underwent great changes in the middle of the seventeenth century, and I have carried the process further by using modern spelling and punctuation, except when there appeared to be some advantage in keeping the old. It was originally intended that the translation should be reprinted in another series, as a piece of English literature in its own right

1 See F. W. H. Myers, Classical Essays, pp. 128, 168, 174, and Wordsworth (English Men of Letters), p. 182.

which indeed it is. It seemed, however, that there was room for an edition of the Fourth Aeneid, written without the usual bias against Aeneas; but it is for the translation, not for the notes, such as they are, that the volume is added to Mr. Blackwell's series. Mr. Royds, in the preface to his edition of the Eclogues, addresses himself to middle-aged men with pipes and armchairs, and the present writer has in the main endeavoured to take the same course, while giving references freely to enable such readers to go further in the matter if they will. Virgil, after all, is a far better poet for middle age than for youth. Above all, he has tried to follow Dryden's counsel, 'to avoid impropriety' (unless the quotation from James Smith be held an offence under that head) 'and not to affect to be thought learned in all things' for indeed the pretence would deceive no

one.

It cannot be denied that the Fourth Book, with all its immense fame, has in modern times been a sad stumbling-block to lovers of Virgil, whose Aeneas, as in the prophecy of Marlowe's Dido, has most unreasonably become famous through the world for perjury and slaughter of a queen. The causes of this may be briefly summarized here. If once we yield to the temptation to view the tale of Aeneas and Dido from our modern point of view, instead of quite simply and humbly trying to see what Virgil meant by it, then it is all over with Aeneas, and with Aeneas goes the Aeneid: we are left with only the incidental merits to enjoy. Surely Virgil is great

f

enough to claim this attitude of mind from us as a right.1

In the first place we commonly err by demanding of Aeneas that he should be what Virgil never meant him to be: we look for either a Homeric or a Romantic hero, when in all essentials Aeneas is only a great Roman. Virgil was engaged in 'an honest attempt to present the type of manhood that made Rome,'2 and it may be admitted that Roman pietas is not the most exciting of virtues. Secondly, we certainly suffer, most of us, at school or college or, later, in our armchairs, from reading the poem in single books: the Aeneid, like Paradise Lost, abundantly repays the labour, if labour it be, of those who read it as a whole. In no other way can we judge it aright. Again, the Aeneid is above all things a national poem. Whoever is the enemy of Rome is bound to suffer, and Dido is unquestionably the enemy of Rome. She is ruined because she comes between Aeneas and Heaven's will for him. Lastly, Virgil has made a right understanding harder for us by the depth of his own sympathy with Dido and her suffering. He could not make her a mean or common figure, and she grew in his hands, as Shylock grew in Shakespeare's,3 till she overtops the rest, so

1 If anywhere in these remarks a tone of asperity is audible, may the writer plead in his defence that, having been brought up to think of Aeneas as a dull prig who was also a traitor, he, for years, had half his pleasure in the Aeneid destroyed?

2 Glover, Virgil, p. 321.

3 This comparison has also been made by Professor Gilbert t Norwood in the Classical Quarterly for 1918, Vol. XII., p.147,

that our sympathies conquer our judgment and we feel at moments that Rome was not worth the founding at such a cost. Yet even while we feel so, our reason sits in the wind against us. Mr. Glover speaks truth when he asserts that if our sympathies are with Dido, our judgment is with Aeneas;1 and the effort to keep the balance between judgment and emotion is all gain to the reader. It is those who, like Charles James Fox, give the rein to their emotions, who have made havoc of the Aeneid.2 Aeneas, after all, is what Virgil made him, and if he fled from Carthage it is because Virgil thought it his duty to do so. To argue in one breath that Virgil is, in Stevenson's phrase, the top of creation, and in the next that he made his hero a dastard, is criticism on much the same plane with the twin propositions of Macaulay's notorious essay, that Boswell was an imbecile, and that he wrote the best biography in the world.

'The whole fabric of Virgil's narrative,' wrote Pro

but I do not consciously owe it to him. And Professor Norwood surely goes too far when he asserts that Virgil had contemplated no more than 'a slight secondary figure, an earlier Lavinia.'

1 Glover, Virgil, p. 202.

2 Yet no one has loved the Fourth Aeneid better than Fox. In his last illness he had it read to him over and over again. (C. J. Fox: A Political Study, by J. le B. Hammond, pp. 7, 8.) Whether Fox's judgment was always wise or not, his joy in the classics remains a perennial source of inspiration. (See Sir George Trevelyan, The Early History of C. F. Fox, pp. 298-302.)

fessor Conway in Virgil's Messianic Eclogue,1' we can e hardly doubt, is woven out of the impressions made upon him by the history of his own time.' In this er Fourth Book he tells of a great Roman all but robbed of his destiny by the love of an Oriental queen; and how is it possible to doubt that Cleopatra, who did much harm to Julius, wrecked the career of Antony, and threatened Roman civilization with an appalling danger, was from the first in the poet's mind? His subject may be the tragedy of Dido, but it is also the redemption of Aeneas and the saving of Rome. It is the triumph, by Heaven's aid, of pietas over selfish indulgence.

In writing these notes I have consulted throughout the three commentators on whom Warde Fowler fused to rely-Servius, Henry, and Page. Beyond these I did not go, partly because I knew that if I e bemused myself with a surfeit of commentaries, more harm than good would result. But since the notes were substantially complete, I have turned to Conington and La Cerda for light in dark places—and have not always found it. As I differ, even with violence, from Mr. Page on the main matter of this book, I take this opportunity of saying that his edition, which ten years ago by some accident I had never met, has taught me more of Virgil than any other. No one has a keener eye to see the meaning of a text. The distinguishing mark of his edition is its Johnsonian common sense, supported at times by a Johnsonian bludgeon. What I owe to Mr. Glover's

1 P. 43.