to exclude him from the benefit of a similar plea, if indeed it should not suggest fresh matter for consideration with regard to the laws generally, and probably with justice, supposed to distinguish the two great schools of Ancient and Modern Art.

This, however, is not the only kind of confusion by which the pastoral reality of the Eclogues is disturbed or destroyed. Not only is the Sicilian mixed up with the Italian, but the shepherd is mixed up with the poet. The danger was one to have been apprehended from the first. So soon as pastoral poetry came to be recognized as a distinct species, the men of letters who cultivated it, perhaps themselves grammarians or professional critics, were likely to yield to the temptation of painting themselves in bucolic colours, instead of copying the actual bucolic life which they saw or might have seen in the country. They started from the position that shepherds, besides being subjects for poetry, were themselves singers and lovers of song; it was not difficult to convert the proposition, and assume that a pastoral singer might be spoken of as a shepherd. A symptom of this failing appears even in Theocritus, in whose seventh Idyl the speaker, describing himself as being in company with a poetical goatherd, modestly declines a comparison with the professed poets Asclepiades and Philetas, thereby intimating that he is himself a professed poet in disguise.1 In Moschus the identification is more consciously realized. Bion is bewailed as the ideal herdsman, for whom Apollo and the wood-gods wept, whose strains drew looks of love from Galatea, and whose pipe even the lips of Pan may scarcely touch. Those, however, who wish to see to what extent it may be interwoven with the texture of a series of poems, should look for it in the Eclogues. They will not have very far to seek; indeed it meets them at the very threshold. Nothing but the extreme awkwardness of the manner in which it is introduced into the first Eclogue could have prevented the critics from recognizing it at once. As it is, they

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οὐ γάρ πω, κατ' ἐμὸν νόον, οὔτε τὸν ἐσθλὸν Σικελίδαν νίκημι τὸν ἐκ Σάμω, οὔτε Φιλητάν, ἀείδων, βάτραχος δέ ποτ' ἀκρίδας ὥς τις ἐρίσδω.

(Theocr. VII 39.)

2 ÖTTI Biwv Téðvakev ỏ ßovкóλog. (Moschus, III II: but see the whole context.)

have passed it over in their search for something more recondite and more creditable to Virgil. Their view, as elaborated by the latest commentators,' is that Tityrus is a supposed farm-slave perhaps a bailiff of Virgil's, who, going to Rome to purchase his freedom, receives the welcome assurance that his master's property is to be undisturbed in the general unsettlement; the obvious truth is (I am stating not my own discovery but that of my former coadjutor) that the notions of the enfranchised slave and the poet secured in his farm, the symbol and the thing symbolized, are actually blended together, so that the narrative is at one time allegorical, at another historical, Tityrus going with his earnings to his master, and receiving for answer, 'You shall not be dispossessed by my soldiers.' The same conventional conception reappears in other places, though it is nowhere else so clumsily managed. Menalcas, the poet-shepherd of the ninth Eclogue, whose strains were so nearly lost to the world, is admitted on all hands to be Virgil himself. In the opening of the sixth, Virgil is once more the shepherd Tityrus, who is taught by Apollo that a shepherd's duty is to make his sheep fat and his verses thin. If Virgil is a shepherd because he is a poet, his friends, as being poets themselves, or at least friends of a poet, must be shepherds too, and the times upon which he has fallen must be described by pastoral images. Gallus, the soldier and elegiac poet, already introduced among the heroes of mythology in the sixth Eclogue, appears in the tenth as the dying shepherd of Theocritus, languishing under the shelter of a rock, and consoled by the rural gods; he is at the same moment in Italy and in Arcadia, acting with Octavianus against Sex. Pompeius, and bewailing his lost love in the ears of ideal swains. Whatever may be the ultimate source of the inspiration which animates the fourth Eclogue, and whoever the child shadowed forth as the king of the peaceful world, the poem is evidently a description of the new era supposed to be inaugurated in Pollio's consulship by the peace of Brundisium; but the golden age is represented as a golden age of pastoral life, where art is to be nothing and nature every thing, a recollection of the legendary

1 See, for instance, Wunderlich, quoted by Wagner at the end of Heyne's Argument of Ecl. I.

past in Hesiod converted into an anticipation of the historical future. So the Daphnis of the fifth Eclogue is evidently the great Julius, as the similarity of the images to those in the preceding poem is sufficient to show; it is a pastoral poet that celebrates him, and therefore he must be celebrated as a shepherd, wept by all nature in his death, powerful and honoured as a rural god in his immortality. Even where the poems appear at first sight to be purely dramatic and impersonal, the poet is still visible. Menalcas, an actor in the fifth Eclogue, announces himself at the end of it as the author of the second and third; in the ninth (v. 19) an intimation is made from which we infer that the fifth also is really his work, the song of Mopsus no less than his own. The second Eclogue is one which we should gladly believe to be purely ideal, instead of shifting the tradition which professes to verify it: nor need we be anxious to think with Servius that the song of Silenus to the shepherds is really an epicurean lecture delivered by Siron to his pupils. But when we find shepherds rivalling each other for the favour of Pollio, and lampooning Bavius and Maevius, we feel that jealousy for the poet's credit as a painter of life is rather a misplaced sentiment.1

It is as an artist that Virgil appears chiefly to challenge our admiration, as in his other works, so also in the Bucolics. The language, indeed, which he puts into the mouths of his pastoral personages is for the most part as undramatic as the thoughts which that language expresses are conventional and unreal. In a very few instances he attempts to produce an appearance of rusticity by an archaism, a proverb, a conversational ellipse, a clumsy circumlocution; even there, however, he seems to be

1 It may be said that in Milton's Lycidas the Virgilian confusion of shepherd and poet is turned into mere chaos by the introduction of a third element, the Christian shepherd or minister. There is, however, this difference, that the object, no less than the effect, of the poem is not to describe pastoral life, but to paint student life in pastoral colours. The tenth Eclogue might take the benefit of the same distinction, if we could separate it in our judgment from the rest. Milton's use of mythology might afford another ground for comparison with Virgil: but the subject is too large for a note.

2 See Gebauer's De Poetarum Graecorum. Bucolicorum, imprimis Theocriti, Carminibus in Eclogis a Vergilio adumbratis, Libri Duo (Leipsic, 1861), pp. 8 foll., a valuable monograph, of which I believe only the first volume has yet appeared.

There is a passage in Wycherley's recommendatory lines on Pope's Pastorals

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copying Theocritus, rather than following the nature which he had seen around him, and the strain in which his shepherds usually converse is scarcely less elaborate than the ordinary diction of the Georgics or the Aeneid. So in the practice of the Greek poets the bucolic hexameter had a structure of its own :1 as handled by Virgil it does not differ from the didactic or the epic. Yet a more poetical people than the Romans might be pardoned if they forgot their sense of dramatic propriety in the delight with which they welcomed such specimens of language and versification as those which the Eclogues every where exhibit. The tedious labour of the file, the absence of which is deplored by Horace as fatal to the excellence of Roman poetry, had at last found an artist who would submit to it without complaining. The finished excellence of his workmanship is a fact which will not be readily impeached or overlooked, though its

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which is worth quoting, not only for its own ingenuity, but as expressing the view taken by Pope and his friends of the language in which pastoral poetry should be written a view probably not very unlike Virgil's own, mutatis mutandis.

'Like some fair shepherdess, the silvan Muse

Should wear those flowers her native fields produce,

And the true measure of the shepherd's wit

Should, like his garb, be for the country fit:

Yet must his pure and unaffected thought

More nicely than the common swain's be wrought:

So with becoming art the players dress

In silks the shepherd and the shepherdess,

Yet still unchanged the form and mode remain,

Shaped like the homely russet of the swain.'

See also Pope's discourse on Pastoral Poetry, prefixed to his Pastorals, where he lays down practical rules for bucolic writing, and his ironical comparison of his own Pastorals with Philips' (Guardian, No. 40), where the doctrine that shepherds ought to deal in proverbs is not forgotten.

1 See Gebauer, pp. 70 foll., where too much is perhaps made of the instances— not more than 240 lines out of the whole number-in which the bucolic caesura is preserved. It is evident that Virgil set no store by it whatever as a necessary law of composition: that he should have employed it in the Eclogues more frequently than in the other two poems, is no more than is natural in a young writer just beginning to form his versification, and at the time familiar with the cadence of Theocritus. Gebauer, however, has done good service in pointing out throughout his work instances in which Virgil, without distinctly imitating Theocritus, has taken a hint from him in language or versification. Such inquiries are apt to seem tediously minute: but they cannot be safely overlooked by any one who would really appreciate the art of such a writer as Virgil.

2 Hor. Ep. 11 i 167, Ars Poet. 290.

importance may easily be underrated. We are apt, perhaps, not sufficiently to consider what is involved in the style or diction of poetry. We distinguish sharply between the general conception and the language, as if the power which strikes out the one were something quite different from the skill which elaborates the other. No doubt there is a difference between the two operations, and one which must place a poet like Virgil at a disadvantage as compared with the writers whom he followed; but it would be a mistake to suppose that imagination may not be shown in the words which embody a thought as well as in the thought which they embody. To express a thought in language is in truth to express a larger conception by the help of a number of smaller ones; and the same poetical faculty which originates the one may well be employed in producing the other. It is not merely that the adaptation of the words to the thought itself requires a poet's sense, though this is much; but that the words themselves are images, each possessing, or capable of possessing, a beauty of its own, which need not be impaired, but may be illustrated and set off, by its relative position, as contributing to the development of another and more complex beauty. It is not necessary that these words, in order to be poetical, should be picturesque in the strict sense of the term; on the contrary, it may suit the poet's object to make a physical image retire into the shade, not advance into prominent light: but the imagination will still be appealed to, whatever may be the avenue of approach—by the effect of perspective, by artful juxtaposition, by musical sound, or perhaps, as we have already seen, by remote intellectual association. The central thought may be borrowed or unreal, yet the subordinate conceptions may be true and beautiful, whether the subordination be that of a paragraph to an entire poem, a sentence to a paragraph, or a phrase or word to a sentence. It is, I conceive, to a perception of this fact, and not to a deference to any popular or mechanical notion of composition, that the praise of style and execution in poetry is to be referred. Poetry is defined by Coleridge1 to be the best words in their right places; and though at the first statement his view may appear disappointing and inadequate, it

1 Table Talk.