charm of Virgil may prove some antidote to the excitement, the restlessness, the unsettlement of opinion in the present day. And as it is by the young especially that the imaginative art of Virgil, in comparison with the imaginative art of other great poets, is most questioned, they may be reminded that the words of such a writer are best understood after long study and experience of life have enabled us to feel 'their sad earnestness and vivid exactness 1. The wise and generous counsel of Burke should induce at least an honest suspense of judgment on the part of those to whom the power and charm of this poet have been slow in revealing themselves :

'Different from them are all the great critics. They have taught us one essential rule. I think the excellent and philosophic artist, a true judge as well as perfect follower of Nature, Sir Joshua Reynolds, has somewhere applied it or something like it in his own profession. It is this, that if ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers and artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire ; and if we cannot arrive at this union of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull than that the rest of the world has been imposed on 2.'

1 Grammar of Assent, by J. H. Newman, D.D.

2 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.

CHAPTER III.

LIFE AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF VIRGIL.

I.

Sources of our knowledge of Virgil's Life.

THE sources of our knowledge of the lives, social relations, and characters of the eminent writers of antiquity are of various kinds. Our most valuable evidence consists of direct personal statements in their own works. There is, however, a considerable difference in the amount and kind of information which the Roman poets afford about themselves. Thus while the works of Horace contain almost a complete autobiography, no single circumstance of the life of Lucretius, except his intimacy with Memmius, can be learned from his poem. But in those instances in which Latin authors have written much about themselves, their vivid power of realising things in which they were interested has enabled them to paint their own portraits in distinct and lasting colours. Though the Romans cared little for speculative truth, yet they appear remarkable for a straightforward veracity and frank communicativeness of disposition. There are no men of equal distinction whom we seem to know so intimately as Cicero and Horace; and, though they are less interesting men, we have similar facilities for reading the characters of Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid. They are unreserved and trustworthy witnesses of their own weaknesses as well as of their better qualities.

Their frankness of nature and their vivid sense of life enable us also to interpret the indirect and unconscious self-revelations of Latin authors with more confidence than in the case of Greek, or even of many modern men of letters. Their comparative want of dramatic imagination compelled them to draw much of their poetical material from their personal experience and convictions. It is indeed a difficult question to determine how far the idea of the inner personal life of a great writer which we form from his works corresponds with the actual aspect which he presented to his contemporaries. The biographies of men of genius in modern times sometimes bring to light the evidence of a fatal and life-long struggle between the aspirations of the higher and the seductions of the lower nature. Some writers, again, of vigorous imagination and strong poetical sensibility have been at the same time men of so robust a fibre that their genius for literature may have seemed less conspicuous to those among whom they lived than their capacity for action, for social intercourse, and the varied business and enjoyment of life. Others, again, seem to have produced their great results by a rigid economy in using and husbanding their original gifts. Yet even these varieties of the poetic temperament betray themselves in the work accomplished, through some prodigal waste of power and passion, as in Byron; some careless freedom and large geniality of treatment, as in Scott; or a grave temperance and equable serenity of feeling, as in Wordsworth. Differing infinitely, as they may do, from one another in powers of self-control and obedience to their higher instincts, the greatest poets and artists have one quality in common-absolute sincerity of nature. They give the world of their strongest and best, not because they wish to be thought other than they are, but because it is their strongest and best self which alone deeply interests them and demands expression.

But whether this expression of their highest self agreed with the ordinary manifestation of their qualities in action and social intercourse can best be learned from the evidence

L

of contemporaries, who by position and congenial tastes were able to know and likely to speak the truth. The affection which a poet or artist inspires among those of his own craft and the memory which he leaves behind him help to confirm the impression of his higher or gentler nature stamped on his works. The assurance that this higher or gentler nature manifested itself also in his life adds authority and conviction to his teaching. In those cases where genius has co-existed with weakness or lawlessness of character, if these defects fail to reveal themselves in the work done, they are not likely to have been passed unnoticed by contemporaries; and the impression of them, formed in a time of active social criticism, is likely to have been transmitted to future times probably in an exaggerated shape. The Augustan Age was, as we learn from Horace, a time of active contemporary criticism; a time too which connected itself with the times that came after by a continuous literary tradition. It was a time also in which men of letters lived in intimate familiarity with one another. It was not free from the jealousies and mutual animosities of literary coteries. Not only the actual evidence of contemporary authors, but the prevailing impression transmitted by them to the following generations, may be accepted as trustworthy evidence of character. The survival of faint traces of disparagement or of serious imputation implies nothing more than that the highest natures did not altogether escape calumny in their lifetime, although this detraction could not prevail against the general sentiment of affection and veneration which they inspired.

In addition to the accidental notices in the works of contemporaries and writers of a succeeding generation, some short biographies of eminent Latin writers, written long after their deaths, have reached modern times. In cases where their actual biographies have been lost, fragments or summaries of them have been preserved in Jerome's continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, and occasionally in commentaries or scholia appended to their own

works. Roman literature from a comparatively early period produced a large number of grammarians, commentators, and rhetoricians. In the Ciceronian Age, Varro wrote several books on literary history and the earlier poets; and Cornelius Nepos included in his Biographies the lives of men of letters, among others of his own contemporary, Atticus. Jerome, in the prefatory letter to his own work 'De Viris Illustribus1,' mentions the names of Varro, Santra, Nepos, Hyginus, and Suetonius as authors of literary biography, and proposes to follow in his own work the precedent set by the last of these authors. Of the work of Suetonius 'De Viris Illustribus,' written in the second century, and containing the lives of eminent poets, orators, historians, philosophers, grammarians, and rhetoricians, considerable portions have been preserved; among others the complete biographies of Terence and Horace. This work became the chief authority to later commentators for the facts recorded about the earlier Roman poets, and was the source from which Jerome himself drew the materials for the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle. The question remains as to how far Suetonius himself, writing under the rule of Hadrian, is a trustworthy authority for the lives of poets who lived nearly two centuries before his own era. The answer to this question will depend on the access which he may have had to contemporary sources, transmitted to his time through an uninterrupted channel, and on the evidence of credulity or trustworthiness in accepting or rejecting gossip and scandalous anecdotes which his other writings afford. He appears to have been diligent in his examination of original authorities. On the other hand, his 'Lives of the Caesars' indicate a vein of prurient credulity in regard to the details of charges at which Tacitus only hints by general innuendo. But the main question in regard to the life of each particular poet is, whether there was in existence written evidence dating from contemporary

1 Quoted by Reifferscheid in his Suetonii Reliquiae.