as powerfully and immediately as in the day of its creation. There is also a kind of rhetorical style which produces its effect either of pleasure or distaste immediately. It does not conceal its true character, but tries to force the reader's admiration by startling imagery, or strained emphasis, or tricks of allusive periphrasis. Whether this style is admired or detested, it does not lose its character with the advance of years. Juvenal and Persius probably affect their readers in much the same way as they did three centuries or seventeen centuries ago. But this is not the style of Virgil and of Horace. They produce their effect neither through that direct force which causes a thought to penetrate or an image to rise up immediately before the mind, nor by strained efforts at rhetorical effect. As their language became assimilated with the thought and feeling of successive generations, it may have lost something of the colouring of sentiment and association, of the delicate shades of meaning, of the vital force which it? originally possessed. It has entered into the culture of the world chiefly through impressions produced in early youth, when the mind, though susceptible of graceful variations of words and harmonious effects of rhythm, is too immature to realise fulness of meaning half-concealed by the well-tempered beauty and musical charm of language. The style of Virgil is the fruit of long reflection, and it requires long reflection and familiarity to draw out all its meaning. The word 'meditari,' applied by him to his earlier art, expresses the process through which his mind passed in acquiring its mastery over words. In apprehending the charm of his style it is not of the spontaneous fertility of Nature that we think, but of the harvest yielded to assiduous labour by a soil at once naturally rich and obedient to cultivation-'iustissima tellus.' These characteristics of his art were not unlikely to be overlooked in an age which demanded from the literature of imagination a rapid succession of varied and powerful impressions. III. Virgil's supreme importance in Latin Literature dependent on his representative character. Though some of the causes which tended to lower the estimation in which Virgil was held were only temporary in their operation, yet it can hardly be doubted that his claim to pre-eminence in Latin literature and to a high rank among the greatest poets of all times must, if put forward at all, be maintained on somewhat different grounds from those on which his position formerly rested. He never again can enter into rivalry with Homer as the inspired poet of heroic action. He cannot again enjoy the advantage of being widely known, while access to his predecessor is confined to a few scholars not much in sympathy with the poet of an age so far separated from their own. The art of Virgil in so far as it is a copy of the art of Homer has already produced all the effect on the culture of the world which it is destined to produce. The life of the heroic age will continue to be known to all future times as it was originally fashioned by the creative mind of Homer, not as it was modified by the after-thought of Virgil. What charm Virgil had for his countrymen as the reviver of the early poetry of Greece and as the first creator of the early romance of Italy, what permanent value he has as one of the great interpreters of the secret of Nature and of the meaning of human life, will appear in the course of the detailed examination of his various poems. But there are some considerations, from an historical point of view, which may be stated provisionally as grounds for assigning to him the place of most importance in Latin literature. He is, more than any other Latin writer, a representative writer, -representative both of the general national idea and of the sentiment and culture of his own age. One clear note of this representative character is that he absorbs and supersedes so much of what went before him, and that he anticipates and also supersedes much that came after him. The interest which Rome and Italy have for all times, the interest which the Augustan Age has as the epoch of the maturest civilisation of ancient times and as a great turning-point in the history of mankind, will secure the attention of the world to an author who sets before it, in forms of pure art and with elaborate workmanship, the idealised spectacle of the marvellous career of Rome, and enables it best to feel the charm of natural beauty and ancient memories associated 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 enables us to feel, 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, and at the same time to forget all 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 inalienably attaching to 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.' 'Virgile,' writes M. SainteBeuve, 'a été le poëte du Capitole3.' 'Dans ce poëme,' writes M. Coulanges of the Aeneid, 'ils (les Romains) se voyaient, eux, leur fondateur, leur ville, leurs institutions, leurs croyances, leur Empire.' M. Patin again describes 1 Introduction to the Literature of Europe, Part II. chap. v. La cité antique. 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 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 idyll, 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 it does 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 1 Études sur la poésie Latine. the complete impression, moral and physical, of the old Italian land and people,— Terra antiqua potens armis atque ubere glaebae,— 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 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 2 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 senatehouse. 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, (3.) Virgil has expressed also more clearly than any other 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 1 'Perseverantissimo agrorum colendorum studio veteres illi Sabini Quirites atavique Romani,' etc. Columella. 2 Cf. Lucretius, iii. 105-106: VOL. I. Quod faciunt nobis annorum tempora, circum G |