The word 'candidiores' suggests the same qualities of a beautiful nature, the unworldly simplicity and sincerity, which are ascribed to Quintilius in the words 'pudor, incorrupta fides, nudaque veritas.'

The seven years from 37 B. C. to 30 B. C. were devoted by Virgil to the composition of the Georgics, a poem scarcely exceeding 2000 lines in length. His chief residence at this time was Naples :

Me dulcis alebat

Parthenope, studiis florentem ignobilis oti.

He possessed also at this time a country-house or estate in the neighbourhood of Nola; and the fourth Book affords evidence of some time spent at or in the neighbourhood of Tarentum, which is confirmed by the lines in Propertius,

Tu canis umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi

Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin arundinibus,—

the region prized by Horace as second only to his beloved Tibur. In the year 29 B. C. he read the whole poem to Augustus, on his return from Asia, at the town of Atella. The reading occupied four days. Maecenas was of the party, and relieved the poet in the task of reading.

The remaining years of his life were spent in the composition of the Aeneid. One of the poems of the Catalecta (vi.) gives expression to a vow binding the poet to sacrifice a bull to Venus if he succeeded in accomplishing the task which he had imposed on himself. So early as the year 26 B. C., Augustus, while engaged in the Cantabrian war, had desired to see some part of the poem. It was in answer to that request that Virgil wrote the letter of which the fragment, quoted in the previous chapter, has been preserved by Macrobius. At a later time, after the death of the young Marcellus (23 B. C.), he read three Books to Augustus and the other members of his family.

After spending eleven years on the composition of his great epic, he set aside three more for its final correction. In the year 19 B. C. he set out with the view of travelling in Greece and Asia. Meeting Augustus at Athens, he was

persuaded to abandon his purpose and return with him to Italy. While visiting Megara under a burning sun he was seized with illness. Continuing his voyage without interruption, he became worse, and on the 21st of September, a few days after landing at Brundisium, he died in the fiftyfirst year of his age. In his last illness he showed the ruling passion of his life-the craving for perfection, by calling for the cases which held his MSS., with the intention of burning the Aeneid. It is characteristic of his unsanguine self-depreciating nature, that his final hours were clouded by this sad sense of failure, rather than brightened by such confident assurances of immortality as other Roman poets have expressed. In the same spirit of dissatisfaction with all imperfect accomplishment, he left directions in his will that his executors, Varius and Tucca, should publish nothing but what had been already edited by him. This direction, which would have deprived the world of the Aeneid, was disregarded by them in compliance with the commands of Augustus.

He was buried at Naples, where his tomb was long regarded with religious veneration and visited as a temple; and tradition long associated his name, as that of a magician, with the construction of the great tunnel of Posilippo, in its immediate neighbourhood.

III.

Personal Characteristics.

The interest of the life of Virgil lies in the bearing of his circumstances on the development of his genius, in the view which it affords of his whole nature as a man, and in the relation of that nature to the work accomplished by him as a poet. The biography of Horace has an independent value as affording insight into social life and character, irrespective of the light which it reflects on the art of the poet. But no separate line of action, adventure, or enjoyment runs through and intermingles with the even course of Virgil's poetic career. And this may

have been a drawback to him as the poet of political action, of heroic adventure, and of human character. His career in this respect is unlike that of other great poets who have been endowed with the epic or dramatic faculty, such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, Scott, and Goethe, who either took part in the serious action of their age, or gave proof in their lives of some share of the adventurous spirit or of the rich social nature which they have delineated in their works. In the same way the life of Livy was that merely of a man of letters, and thus different from that of the other great historians of antiquity, who had either passed through a career of adventure, like Herodotus and Xenophon, or had been actively engaged in public affairs, like Thucydides and Polybius, Sallust and Tacitus. The 'inscitia Reipublicae ut alienae' thus betrays itself in Livy more than in any of those historians who have been named. /Virgil's life was as much one of pure contemplation or absorption in his art, as that of Lucretius or Wordsworth. The first half of his career, from childhood, to maturity, was an education, passive and active, for the position he was destined to fill as the greatest literary artist and greatest national poet of Rome. His later career, from the age of twenty-eight till his too early death, was the fulfilment of the office to which he had dedicated himself. With the exception of one troubled year of his early manhood, which proved the turning-point of his fortunes, he lived, undistracted by business or pleasure, the life of a scholar and poet, combining the concentrated industry of the first with the sense of joyful activity and ever-ripening faculty which sustains and cheers the second. In youth his means of living must have been moderate, yet sufficient to enable him to forsake everything else for his art; in later life, through the munificence of Augustus, he was rich enough to enjoy exemption from the cares of life, and to gratify freely the one taste by which his poetical gifts were fostered-that of living and varying his residence among the fairest scenes of Southern Italy. The one drawback to his happiness, viz. that he suffered

during all his life from delicate or variable health1, was not unfavourable to the concentration of his whole nature on his self-appointed task. It saved him from ever sacrificing the high aim of his existence to the pleasures in which his contemporaries freely indulged, and to which the imaginative temperament of the poets and artists of a southern land are powerfully attracted. The abstemious regimen which from necessity or inclination he observed, the fact recorded of him that he was 'cibi vinique minimi,' must have quickened the finer sources of emotion by which his genius was nourished. Had he received from nature a robuster fibre and more hardihood of spirit, or had his character been more tempered by collision with the active forces of life, his epic poem might have shown a more original energy, and greater power in delineating varied types of character; but in combination with a robuster or more energetic temper, much of the peculiar charm of Virgil would have been lost.

He is said to have been of a tall and awkward figure, of dark complexion, and to have preserved through all his life a look of rusticity. He wanted readiness in ordinary conversation, and never overcame the shyness of his rustic origin or studious habits. It is reported that in his rare visits to Rome he avoided observation, and took refuge in the nearest house from the crowds of people who recognised or followed him. The 'monstrari digito praetereuntium' was to him a source of embarrassment rather than of that gratification which Horace derived from it.

Both his parents lived till after the loss of his farm, when the poet was in his twenty-ninth year. Two brothers died before him, one while still a boy, the other after reaching manhood. To his half-brother Valerius Proculus he left one half of his estate. Augustus, Maecenas, and his two friends Varius and Tucca also received legacies.

1 'Nam plerumque a stomacho et a faucibus ac dolore capitis laborabat, sanguinem etiam saepe rejecit.' Cf. what Sainte-Beuve says of Bayle: 'Il lui était utile même d'avoir cette santé frêle, ennemi de la bonne chère, ne sollicitant jamais aux distractions.'

He was never married, nor is there any record in connexion with him of any of those temporary liaisons which the other poets of the Augustan Age formed and celebrated in their verse. Some modern critics arguing from a single expression in the Life by Donatus, and giving to a tradition connected with the subject of the second Eclogue a meaning which, even if the tradition were trustworthy, need not apply to it, have written of Virgil as if throughout his whole life he yielded to a laxity of morals from which perhaps some of his eminent contemporaries were not free, but which was condemned by the manlier instincts of Romans, as of all modern nations. The expression of Donatus is probably a mere survival of the calumnies against which Asconius vindicated Virgil's character. The statement of the same biographer, that on account of his purity of speech and life he was known in Naples by the name 'Parthenias,' is at least as trustworthy evidence as that on which the imputations on his character have been revived. The levity and mendacity with which such calumnies were invented1, and the attractions which they have for the baser nature of men in all times, sufficiently explain both the original existence and the later revival of these imputations. We are called upon not merely to disregard them as unproved, or irrelevant to our estimate of the poet's art, but to reject them as incompatible with the singular purity and transparent sincerity of nature revealed in all the maturer works of his genius2.

The cordial and discriminating language both of the Satires and the Odes of Horace confirms the impression of delicacy and simplicity of character suggested by the general tone of Virgil's writings. The appreciation of

1 Cp. Journal of Philology, Part III. Article on the twenty-ninth poem of Catullus.

2 The German historians of Roman literature are more just in their judgment of Virgil's character than of his genius. Thus W. S. Teuffel puts aside these scandals with the brusque and contemptuous remark-‘Der Klatsch bei Donatus über sein Verhältniss zu seinen Lieblingssklaven Alexander und Kebes, so wie zu Plotia Hieria, einer amica des L. Varius, beurtheilte nach sich selbst das was ihm an Vergil unbegreiflich war.'