Horace for Virgil reminds us of the touching tribute which the great comic poet of Athens pays to her greatest tragic poet, where he speaks of him as showing the same disposition among the Shades as he had shown in the world above

Ὁ δ' εὔκολος μὲν ἐνθάδ', εὔκολος δ ̓ ἐκεῖ

and of that similar tribute paid by his friend and fellowdramatist to our own great poet, in the words 'my gentle Shakspeare.'/The affection and admiration of the greatest of his contemporaries, surviving in the tradition handed. on to future times, testifies to Virgil's exemption from the personal frailties and asperities to which the impressible and mobile temperament of genius is peculiarly liable.

His works do not present any single distinct impression of the poet himself, in his own character and convictions, separable from his artistic representation. Yet from the study of these works we are able to form a general conception of the disposition, affections, and moral sympathies which distinguish him from the other great writers of his country. We might perhaps without undue fancifulness express the dominant ethical or social characteristic-the ideal virtue or grace-of some of the great Roman writers by some word peculiarly expressive of Roman character or culture, and of frequent use in these writers themselves. Thus, in regard to Cicero, the man of quick susceptibility to praise and blame, to sympathy and coldness, who, except where his personal or political antagonism was roused, had the liveliest sense of the claims of kind offices and kind feeling which men have on one another, the word humanitas seems to sum up those qualities of heart and intellect which, in spite of the transparent weaknesses of his character, gained for him so much affection, and which, through the sympathy they enabled him to feel and arouse in others, were the secret of his unparalleled success as an advocate. To Lucretius we might apply the word sanctitas, in the sense in which he applies the word sanctus to the old

1 Aristoph. Frogs, 82.

philosophers, as expressive of that glow of reverential emotion which animates him in his search after truth and in his contemplation of Nature. His own words 'lepor' and 'lepidus' express the graceful vivacity, 'artistic and social rather than ethical, which we associate with the thought of Catullus. The quality, mainly intellectual and social, but still not devoid of ethical content, of which Horace is the most perfect type, is 'urbanitas.' The full meaning of the great Roman word 'gravitas'—the vital force of ethical feeling as well as the strength of character connoted by it, and by its sister-qualities 'dignity and authority' is only completely realised in the pages of Tacitus. And so it is only in Virgil, and especially in that poem in which he deals with types of human character and motives originating in human affection, that we understand all the feelings of love to family and country, and of fidelity to the dead, and that sense of the dependence on a higher Power, sanctioning and sanctifying these feelings and the duties demanded by them, which the Romans comprehended in their use of the word 'pietas.' /

With this recognition of man's dependence on a wise and beneficent Power above him, is perhaps connected another moral characteristic strongly indicated in many passages of the Aeneid, and mentioned among the personal attributes of Virgil in some of the editions of Donatus's Life, though it does not appear in that accepted by the latest critics as resting on the best MS. authority'. This quality is the stoical power of endurance which he attributes to his hero, but which in him is combined with nothing either of the austerity or pedantry of Stoicism. The passage in the biography, which, if an interpolation in the original Life, is one that is at least 'well invented,' is as follows:'Solitus erat dicere, nullam virtutem commodiorem homini esse patientia, ac nullam asperam adeo fortunam esse quam prudenter patiendo vir fortis non vincat.' Mr. Wickham, in his edition of Horace, refers to this passage as illustrating

1 Cf. Reifferscheid, p. 67.

the maxims of consolation addressed by Horace to Virgil on the death of their friend Quintilius:

Durum: sed levius fit patientia

Quidquid corrigere est nefas.

Many lines in the Aeneid, such as the

Quidquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est

Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,

Fortunam ex aliis

indicate that the gentleness of Virgil, if combined with a peace-loving disposition, was not incompatible with Roman fortitude and resolute endurance.

The reproach from which it is impossible entirely to clear his memory is that of undue subservience to power. It was in the qualities of independence and self-assertion that his character was deficient. It is to the excess of his

feeling of deference to power, and not to any insincerity of nature, that we attribute the language occasionally-as in the Invocation to the Georgics—transcending the limits of truth and, sobriety, in which the position of Augustus is magnified. It is for ever to be regretted that he was induced to sacrifice not only the tribute of admiration originally offered to the friend of his youth, but even the symmetrical conception of his greatest poem, to the jealousy which Augustus entertained of the memory of Gallus. Virgil, again, has no sympathy with political life, as it realised itself in the ancient republics, or with the energetic types of character which the conflicts of political life develope. His own somewhat submissive disposition, his personal attachments and admirations, his hatred of strife, his yearning after peace and reconcilement, made him a sincere supporter of the idea of the Empire in opposition to that of the Republic. To a character of a more combative energy and power of resistance it would have been scarcely possible to have been unmoved by the spectacle of the final overthrow of ancient freedom, though that freedom had for a long time previously contributed little to human happiness. But the nobleness of Virgil's nature is not the nobleness of those qualities which make men great in

resistance to wrong, but the nobleness of a gentle and gracious spirit.

By no poet in any time has he been surpassed in devotion to his art. Into this channel all the currents of his being, all fresh sources of feeling, all the streams of his meditation and research were poured. The delight in poetry and the kindred delight in the beauty of Nature were the main springs of his happiness. With the high ambition of genius and the unceasing aim at perfection he combined a remarkable modesty and a generous appreciation of all poets who had gone before him. But distrust in himself never led to any flagging of energy. The stories told of his habits of composition confirm the impression of his assiduous industry. In writing the Georgics he is said to have dictated many lines early in the morning, under the first impulse of his inspiration, and to have employed the remainder of the day in concentrating their force within the smallest compass. Of no poem of equal length can it be said that there is so little that is superfluous. He himself described this mode of composition by the phrase 'parere se versus modo atque ritu ursino'-'that he produced verses by licking them into shape as a bear did with her cubs.' The Aeneid was first arranged and written out in prose; when the structure of the story was distinct to his mind, he proceeded to work on different parts of it, as his fancy moved him. Another statement in regard to his manner of reading is worth mentioning, as indicating the powerful inspiration of the true doidos, which he added to the patient industry of the conscientious artist. It is recorded on the authority of a contemporary poet, that he read his own poems with such a wonderful sweetness and charm ('suavitate tum lenociniis miris'), that verses which would have sounded commonplace when read by another, produced a marvellous effect when 'chanted to their own music'' by the poet himself. Similar testimony is given

1 Compare the lines of Coleridge on reading 'The Prelude' read aloud by Wordsworth:'An Orphic song indeed, A song divine of high and passionate thoughts To their own music chanted.'

of the effect produced by the reading or recitation of their own works by some among our own poets, Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron among others. This large, musical, and impassioned utterance-the 'os magna sonaturum '—is a sure note of that access of emotion which forces the poet to find a rhythmical expression for his thought.

It was through the union of a strong and delicate vein of original genius with a great receptive capacity and an unwearied love of his art that Virgil established and for a long time retained his ascendency as one of the two whom the world honoured as its greatest poets. Though his supremacy has been shaken, and is not likely ever again to be fully re-established, the examination of his various works will show that it was not through accident or caprice that one of the highest places in the dynasty of genius was allotted to him, and that his still remains one of the few great names which belong, not to any particular age or nation, but to all time and to every people.