faults in language; for it reverses the thing it should represent. If I buy a mirror, I would rather buy one which has fifty small flaws in it, than one which places my feet where my head should be.

The question is ultimately one of taste: we habitually allow to poets whom we admire a licence which we should forbid to others: Shakespeare may mix his metaphors: Browning may outrage convention by his rhymes: the great poets may steal horses while their lesser brethren may not look through the stable door. But it is not by these artifices that Virgil has established himself among the masters of language: it is rather by that other power demanded by Wordsworth-that of 'throwing over incidents from common life a certain colouring of imagination'. This is a quality which no one can deny him: 'he is a master of that mysterious power which by mere arrangement of sound can convey an emotion which no one could have predicted beforehand, and which no known laws can explain'.1

THE TRANSLATORS OF VIRGIL.

The first translation of Virgil into English was made by William Caxton: it was 'reduced' by him 'oute of frenshe in to Englysshe' and was for this and other reasons a very long way from the Latin-how far may be judged from the fact that the first two lines of Dido's address to Anna in Book IV are rendered into nearly ten lines of prose.

The severe criticism of Caxton's successor, Bishop Douglas, appears to have some justification :

His buk is na mare like Virgil, dar I lay,

Than the nyght oule resemblis the popingay.

The next version of interest is that begun by the Earl of Surrey, whose translation of the second and fourth books is the earliest example of English blank verse. The first complete translation (that of Ogilby) was published in 1649, and Dryden's great version followed before the end of the century. To him succeeded many translators in blank verse, and some 1 Myers, loc cit.

who challenged Dryden with the weapons of Pope, but none until the nineteenth century with any prospect of success.1 Wordsworth at one time determined to attempt the task. Though himself believing Miltonic blank verse to be the right equivalent for the Virgilian hexameter, he adopted the couplet on the ground that no poem on so remote a theme would be read with interest without the aid of rhyme. He accomplished several books, but never succeeded so well as he does in 'Laodamia' in recalling the spirit of antiquity. Other poets have followed in his steps. In this edition specimens will be found of five modern versions of the whole or part of the Aeneid, and the reader will have the opportunity of forming his own opinion of their adequacy and of comparing them with Dryden: but it may be worth while to add a few general considerations on the subject.

The first question which translators have to decide is whether or not they are to employ rhyme. If they choose blank verse they may find it prove 'only a laborious and doubtful struggle to escape from the fangs of prose', and that 'if it ever ventures to relax into simple and natural phraseology it instantly becomes tame and the prey of its pursuer': if they choose rhyme they must, in Conington's judgement, ' sacrifice all that makes Virgil's manner what it is, and the one thing that the public has to care for is the goodness or badness of the substitute they offer.' This verdict perhaps exaggerates the truth: some English metres no doubt approach more nearly to the Virgilian type than others: it may be said, for example, of the metre which Conington himself selected that it would be clearly intolerable in the hands of a less exact scholar. Mr. Myers says with truth that 'to reproduce a great poet in another language is as impossible as to reproduce nature on canvas. In the case of an author so

complex and profound as Virgil, every student will naturally

1 Much of this section is taken from Conington's Essay on The English Translators of Virgil, Misc. Works, Vol. I.

discern a different phase of his significance'. It is perhaps permissible to add, as an expression of personal opinion, that in the few passages which Mr. Myers has himself translated he has come nearer than any other English poet to reproducing the spirit and the tone of the original.

Books IV, V, and VI.

These three books illustrate different aspects of the genius and the method of Virgil. In Book IV he shows himself, as has been already suggested, possessed of greater dramatic power, and of a deeper insight into character, than we should have expected. Dido's loneliness and isolation and the dangers which surround her awaken our pity: we see the gradual dawning of her love for Aeneas, roused by his beauty, strengthened by the appeal which his character makes to her admiration and his misfortunes to her pity. We notice a true psychology in her abrupt changes of mood and the alternations between dignity and self-abandonment, between fury and despair. Aeneas again, though, as has been said, he makes little appeal to the modern, is yet no unworthy embodiment of the sense of duty: a good Roman, who had seen the State sacrificed for generations to the personal desires and personal passions of men, might be forgiven for dwelling with affection on a man in whom the sense of duty to his country was pre-eminent: for, after all, fidelity to duty is the most characteristic of the great Roman virtues, a virtue displayed by all the greatest and most typical Roman heroes, from Brutus through Regulus and Cato to Marcus Aurelius.

The Fifth Book is in the nature of an interlude, and is for the most part an imitation of Homer. Virgil, 'the maiden of the maiden city' as they called him in the school at Naples, had probably little sympathy with the rough sports he des cribes here, as in the fighting of the later books, he is perhaps misled by his great original into a field unsuited to his genius, but the book, though not great, is not unsuccessful, and affords

a welcome breathing space between the tragedy of the Fourth Book and the grand adventure of the Sixth.

The Sixth Book is the very heart of the poem: here for the first time the poet is in his own land and is able to give vent to that noble patriotism which had in a different form inspired the greatest passages of the Georgics. So long as love of country remains an honourable quality, so long will men of good will be unable to read without emotion the magnificent tribute paid by Virgil to the race he loved.

VIRGIL'S ESCHATOLOGY.

In this section, as throughout the notes on the Sixth Book, it is difficult to exaggerate the debt owed to Mr. Butler's edition, The Sixth Book of the Aeneid (Blackwell).

It must be borne in mind throughout that Virgil's purpose is artistic and not didactic. If it be true that he intended to devote the rest of his years to philosophy, it may well be that this book gives us an indication of the direction which his studies would have taken and of the conclusions which he would probably have reached; but for the present he is content to take whatever suits his purpose from the traditions of the common people and the doctrines of the philosophers, and to unite them, without too much insistence on detail, into one impressive picture.

He owes in this connexion comparatively little to Homer, more to Pindar, and most of all to Plato. The various myths of Plato, though he does not follow them consistently (as indeed they are in detail inconsistent with one another), supply him with most of his eschatology, though we have no means of telling through what channels they reached him. It is probable that the de Republica of Cicero, a patriot no less genuine than himself, was not without its influence. The teaching of the Pythagoreans and of the Orphic mysteries as regards the rebirth of man and his rewards and punishments clearly appealed to him as it had done to Plato, and had obvious advantages for the purpose of revealing the destinies of men yet unborn: but he is not tied to the precise tenets of

any school. It is open to us, if we will, to believe that Virgil, like Plato, aimed merely at giving us a yevvaîov yeûdos, and that he hinted as much in that strange departure of Aeneas through the ivory gate, which brings the book to a close. But no questionings such as these can detract from the greatness of the book, nor rob him of the right to be the only fit companion of his great disciple in a more ambitious journey.

'O glory and light of other poets, may the long study and the great love that has made me unfold thy volume now avail me! thou art my master and my author.' Dante knew that he owed to Virgil more than that pure style which had already done him honour, and had seen in him one of those rarely noble souls who could touch the greatest themes and leave them nobler for the touching.

CONCLUSION.

Enough has been said to suggest the individual position which Virgil occupies among the poets of the world and the very varied estimates which have been made of his greatness. There are some who hold—and it is a fascinating theorythat this conflict of judgement reproduces an internal conflict which can be traced in all his poetry, the conflict between his romantic genius and the formal classicism in which he worked, between his mysticism and his patriotism, between the Roman and the Celt. This division between purpose and performance is never more clearly seen than in the Aeneid. 'Virgil set before himself', we are told', 'a Ulysses, perhaps even an Achilles. Nature set before him a St. Louis-a crusading Knight and a "holy" war. In the issue he hovers between the two conceptions-and fails. Yet there emerges from the failure something greater... than any epical success.' Even when we have discounted the modern passion for ascribing everything which we admire without comprehension in litera

1 By Mr. Garrod, who presents the theory in a most attractive form in English Literature and the Classics (Clarendon Press).