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Place 
 History of 
 
 Lecture given to Oxford Univer- 
 xtension Students J9* by Sir 
 
 rbert Warren, K.C.V.O., 
 
 August, mdccccxxi 
 
 'FORD: BASIL BLACKWELL 
 
 Two Shillings net 
 
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VIRGIL in Relation to 
 the Place of ROM/! in 
 the History of Civilization, 
 
 A Lecture given to Oxford Univer- 
 sity Extension Students, &g* by Sir 
 
 Herbert Mfarren, K.C.V.O., 
 
 if 
 
 in August^ 7ndccccxxi 
 
 OXFORD: BASIL BLACKJVELL 
 
y. 
 
 \ l 
 
 VIRGIL 
 
 in relation to the place of Rome in the 
 Iii story of Civilization. 
 
 "TORBOLE (Lake of Garda), September 12, 1786, after 
 (midday) dinner. How I long to have my friends 
 for a moment with me that they might enjoy the 
 prospect which stretched in front of me! 
 
 "I might have been this evening in Verona, but 
 a noble piece of nature's handiwork lay somewhat 
 off my route, a magnificent spectacle, the Lake of 
 Garda. I did not want to miss it, and rich is the 
 reward which I have received for my detour. 
 
 "From the chamber where I am sitting, a doorway 
 gives on the courtyard beneath. I have dragged my 
 table in front of this and sketched the view with a few 
 lines. You can overlook the lake almost for its entire 
 length; only at the end does it wind out of sight 
 toward the left. The shore, closed in on both sides 
 with hills and mountains, sparkles with innumerable 
 little habitations. 
 
 "After midnight the wind blows from North to 
 South; the traveller therefore who wishes to go down 
 the Lake ought to make his journey at this time, as 
 several hours before sunrise the current of air changes 
 round and streams northwards. At this moment, in 
 the afternoon, it is blowing strongly against me and 
 cooling the hot sun quite delightfully. 
 
 6 211M/3 
 
VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 ■ ' "Simultaneously my guide-book* tells me that the 
 rjake;Was formerly called Benacus, and quotes a verse 
 01 Virgil' which makes mention of it: — 
 
 Fluctibus et fremitu resonans, Benace, marino! 
 
 "This is the first Latin verse, the meaning of which 
 has come with living force before me, and which, at 
 the moment when the wind is growing stronger, and 
 yet stronger, and the lake is dashing ever higher 
 waves against the quay, is as true now, as many 
 centuries ago. So much has changed, but the wind 
 still rages on the lake, the aspect of which is today, 
 as of old, glorified by a line of Virgil. Written in 
 latitude forty-five degrees, fifty minutes". 
 
 The above extract is taken from that fascinating 
 record of inward and outward experience, Goethe's 
 autobiographic account of his Journey to Italy, in 
 which, as ever with Goethe, the head and the heart, 
 the artist and poet, the man of science and of letters, 
 the intelligent tourist and the passionate pilgrim, are 
 so multifariously blended. 
 
 Either Goethe's excellent German guide-book with 
 which, however passionate his pilgrimage, he char- 
 acteristically went provided, or Goethe himself, has 
 made a slight verbal error in the quotation. Virgil's 
 real line, with its unusual elision, 
 
 Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens, Benace, marino. 
 is finer still in its appeal alike to the eye and the 
 ear, and would have made Goethe's point yet more 
 effectively. 
 
 * Yulkmunn. 
 
AND THE HIST* >RY 01 CIVILIZ VTION 5 
 
 The line is taken from a well-known context, a pas- 
 Sage in the Georgics\ — * 
 
 Anne lacus tantosl le, Lari maxume, teoue, 
 Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens, Bentice % marinot 
 
 There is another poetic allusion to this couplet, 
 better known to the English reader: — 
 ".I 'i J in my head, for half the day, 
 The rich Virgilian rustic measure 
 Of Lari Maxume all the way." — 
 
 Tennyson : The Daisy. 
 
 A century and a half after Goethe's journey, another 
 poet of a different nationality, the famous Victorian 
 Laureate visited this same region, the lake-land of 
 Loinbardy. Tennyson however, when the suggestion 
 came to him, was gazing, not on Garda, but on Como, 
 and the line which surged up in memory for him was 
 the first, and not the second, of Virgil's description. 
 
 Yet the coincidence is significant. So much in truth 
 has changed, but the hills and waters remain, and still, 
 after well nigh two thousand years, Virgil is their 
 truest singer, and still, for those who have learned it 
 in youth, his sweet, melancholy, magic music echoes 
 through their valleys, and round their shores. 
 
 For Virgil too is a "lake poet", and a poet of nature, 
 and an Italian, no less than a Roman singer, and this 
 was Virgil's home land. 
 
 Noiv thy Forum roars no longer, 
 
 fallen every purple Caesar's dome — 
 Tho' thine ocean-roll of rhythm 
 
 sound for ever of Imperial Rome — 
 
 * Georgic II, 159 — 10. 
 
6 VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 It is the irony of the world and its history, that the 
 strong are at the disposal of the weak. The dreamer 
 outlives the doer, the singer the soldier, the annalist 
 the actor, an emperor survives only in an epigram, 
 an empire in an epic. 
 
 Never was this better exemplified than in the for- 
 tune of the greatest and most famous empire of the 
 ancient world, the Roman Empire. It has left lan- 
 guages and laws, temples and theatres, baths and 
 bridges, roads and acqueducts. Its coins may be 
 picked up from Cadiz to the Caspian, nay to China, 
 on the Scottish border, or amid the sands of the 
 Sudan. Its graves are "scattered far and wide, by 
 mount and stream and sea". But its soul, its spirit — 
 where are these to be found? The answer is, in its 
 poets. Of them truly it may be said 
 Spiritus intus a/it — et alitur. 
 
 The first of the Emperors, the founder of the 
 Empire, the first, in the technical sense, of the 
 'Caesars,' was sent as a lad to what may be called 
 the "university" of the Rome of his day. In the 
 class-room of the most fashionable lecturer of the 
 hour on grammar, rhetoric, and literature, a Greek 
 of course, by name Epidius, the nephew and heir 
 of the greatest man in Rome, a smart, brilliant, 
 able boy, whose striking good looks we know from 
 bust and statue, the "young Augustus", looking round 
 on his seniors, might see a lanky, sallow, pensive 
 youth, in appearance like a shy, tall, awkward, 
 sun-burnt, peasant girl, a rustic genius, the son of 
 a successful, self-made yeoman, from the half Italian, 
 half Gaulish countryside in the north, which his uncle 
 
AND THE HISTORY 01 CIVILIZATION 7 
 
 had recently enfranchised, and annexed to Italy and 
 Rome. "Miss Virgil", "the maiden of the Mai 
 
 City", they had called him in the school at Naples 
 from which he had come. 
 
 For s>me reason he was a favourite with the "smart 
 set", the "bloods", the "handsome young men", as he, 
 in turn, styled them. 
 
 He was a poet, a budding Catullus, they said. " I lad 
 he not written an admirable epigram on a notorious 
 highwayman of his own north, 'Old Sling ! , and later, 
 some delightful lines on the 'musty "Mods" lecturers', 
 those 'Crusty Christophers', dry grasshoppers, grating 
 out their shrill, scrannel music?" 
 
 "Poetry, he says now, is, at best, a snare. He's 
 tired of 'words, words, words'. He wants to know 
 the real truth about things. Poetry is pretty and 
 charming, but he is going to follow philosophy. Lu- 
 cretius is now the real bard, not Catullus, and he is 
 going to "chuck Mods", as undergraduates say, and 
 read for "Greats", to leave poetry, and attend the 
 lectures of Siro, a Greek Epicurean philosopher, who 
 has a cottage in his own north country, and is a friend 
 of his father, but who is a spiritual father to his stu- 
 dents, and will lead them on the 'pathway to reality', 
 moral and metaphysical." 
 
 So Virgil's young friends, doubtless, said of him, for 
 so he said of himself. \ 
 
 All this may have been about 50 B.C., when Virgil 
 was twenty, and Augustus thirteen, for we can hardly 
 suppose Augustus to have begun these studies earlier. 
 Virgil himself seems to have gone to school at Cremona 
 between the ages of twelve and thirteen, then to have 
 
8 VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 passed on, at seventeen or eighteen, to Milan, Naples, 
 and Rome. Another pupil in the class-rooms of 
 Epidius, was, it is said, Mark Antony, and there were 
 doubtless others of note, not definitely recorded. 
 
 Then came the Civil War, with Pharsalia in 48 B.C., 
 the death of Julius in 44, Philippi in 42, Actium in 31. 
 Augustus was made Governor of Apollonia before 
 Julius' death, probably about B.C. 43, at the age of 
 twenty. About 41 B.C., followed Virgil's domestic 
 troubles, and his rescue by the powerful, high-born 
 friends to whom he had become known in his student 
 days. 
 
 So "commenced" the greatest of Roman poets. Let 
 us consider his career more systematically. He was 
 born, as Dante notes, just in the end of the old era, 
 and before the establishment of the new: born in the 
 ascendancy of Julius, and under the "false and lying 
 gods",* born forty years before the reign of the first 
 emperor, and seventy before the birth of Christ. 
 
 His birthplace was the tiny hamlet of Andes, per- 
 haps the modern Pietola, a little outside Mantua. His 
 father was a yeoman farmer, originally a farm-hand, 
 perhaps bred a potter, an industrious apprentice, who 
 had married his master's daughter, and been set to 
 look after his fields and flocks, and further had in- 
 creased his little property by buying up scraps of 
 forest land, and keeping bees. 
 
 All kinds of legends adorn Virgil's birth. One 
 charming scene out of his childhood we have, painted 
 by his own pencil. 
 
 * Nacqui sub Julio, ancorche Fosse tardi, 
 E vissi a Roma sotto il buono Augusto 
 Al tempo degli Dei i'alsi c bugiardi. — Inferno /, 70S. 
 
AND THE HIST IRY I IF CIVILIZATK IN 9 
 
 He was reared "among woods and orchards", and 
 one dewy autumn morning, when he was entering on 
 
 his twelfth year, and could just begin to reach the 
 bi >ughs of the trees, he saw his mother in their orchard 
 with a little girl, who was picking up the shining 
 apples from the wet grass. Like Dante, it would 
 m, meeting in his childhood the child Beatrice, he 
 fell madly in love with her. The passage is one which 
 Voltaire and Macaulay alike declare the most beauti- 
 ful in all his works. 
 
 The next year he was sent to school. The object 
 of his early admiration was the wild, Byronic, Cat- 
 tullus, who, born in his own lake-country, was a friend 
 of the smart, high Tory set at Rome, who had been 
 with the fashionable Memmius to Bithynia, and 
 returned, in his own Pontic-built yacht, still to be 
 seen, in Virgil's boyhood, laid up in the little harbour 
 at Sirmto, and whose grande passion for the beaux yeux 
 of the Juno-like Clodia, the scandalous sister of the 
 scandalous Clodius, was the talk of the town, but who 
 also was the friend of the respectable silver-tongued 
 Cicero, and the eloquent little "bantam" barrister and 
 poet Calvus. 
 
 Virgil, and his father too, became friends later of 
 the scientific Greek professor of Epicurean philosophy, 
 Siro, who had a modest villa, a cottage not far from 
 their own, in the lake country. He taught Virgil 
 to admire the tenets of Epicurus, and perhaps, the 
 unfinished, but trenchant and tremendous poems of 
 the ill-starred Lucretius, who made half-mad by in- 
 tense study and the shattering of his old faiths, now 
 writing, now raving, believing in neither a heaven 
 
10 VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 nor a hell for men, and deleteriously dosed by His 
 passionate, pleasure-loving wife, had committed sui- 
 cide, leaving his masterpiece incomplete. His death 
 the chroniclers note, took place on the very day on 
 which Virgil came of age. 
 
 During the earlier years of the war Virgil began to 
 write and publish his Eclogues. The times however 
 became more and more troubled, and anon the storm 
 broke upon his own quiet home. It was invaded 
 by soldiery, and by the land-commissioners of the 
 government, who proposed to divide it among them. 
 There was a nasty fracas on the farm. Virgil's father 
 and lie himself had to fly from their fields, perhaps 
 more than once, and take refuge with Siro. But 
 by and by his great friends intervened, and he was 
 quieted in the possession of his homestead. 
 
 Then he returned to Rome. He began at some 
 time it would seem, to read and prepare for practice 
 at the Bar. But though a "lord of language" he was 
 unready of speech, and his real bent was for learning 
 and science. His love of poetry also came back once 
 and again, and his friends were the poets. 
 
 Chief among them was a witty satiric young clerk 
 in the Treasury, a "Somerset House young man" who 
 hailed from Southern Italy. When the war broke 
 over the Italo-Greek world, Horace, for that was his 
 name, had been out at Athens. There, a loyalist un- 
 dergraduate, he had joined the cause and colours of 
 Pompey. When it was all over he had come back 
 to Italy. He too had lost his property. It was the 
 common fate of the poets. Propertius had lost his 
 
AND THE III-!' >1 \ < >F CIVILIZATK IN I l 
 
 too, and perhaps Tibullus also, and had been 
 lucky than Virgil. 
 
 Virgil and Horace became inseparable bosom 
 friends. When they dined together Virgil would 
 bring a box of spikenard ointment, for Horace was 
 a young elegant, Horace a brittle of wine, to their 
 modest meal, x^s the years went on Virgil became 
 a popular author and hero. He spent most of his 
 time however, like Tennyson in the Isle of Wight, 
 near Naples, where he had studied as a lad, and came 
 little to Rome. When he came, he kept out of the 
 way. When the poets were pointed at, walking down 
 the street, as celebrities, Horace was delighted, but 
 Virgil bolted into the nearest shop to hide. 
 
 But willy-nilly they both of them became friends of 
 the great, admitted behind the scenes, and drawn in 
 to share, sympathize and cooperate with, the high 
 imperial plans of Augustus and Maecaenas. 
 
 "Back to the land", "efficiency", "order", "the trad- 
 itional faith", "the simple life", "our young Prince and 
 our old institutions", these were the catchwords and 
 the watch words in those post-war years. 
 
 The republic had proved a failure. The empire was 
 ■a. fait accompli. The "philosopher king" of Plato was 
 the solution, a "still strong man in a blatant land, who 
 could rule, and dared not lie". To preach this gospel 
 Virgil was absolutely and entirely suited. Was he 
 not himself a child of the Empire? 
 
 Julius Caesar, who had given Virgil's own pro- 
 vincial people their position, who was the friend of 
 the father of Catullus, and had treated the passionate 
 poet with tact and generosity, ignoring his petulant 
 
12 VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 outbursts, and asking him to dinner, was Virgil's 
 youthful hero, and he was prepared to see in Caesar's 
 house, the saviours of society, and the guiding star 
 of Rome. 
 
 But he did not reach this position all at once. 
 His poems mark the stages of his career, and the 
 evolution of his genius, first the Eclogues, then the 
 Georgics, then the Aeneid, this last never quite finished, 
 for he died when only a little over fifty. 
 
 He began, as young poets do, with the experiences 
 of his boyhood, and the studies of his youth. 
 
 It must be remembered and realised that all, or 
 almost all poetry at Rome at this time was largely 
 an artificial and exotic growth. Catullus and Lucre- 
 tius, Virgil's early loves, were both intensely Roman 
 and Italian in their emotions, but both, on their 
 intellectual and artistic side were dominated by Greek 
 models and influences. The politics, the military and 
 naval science, the law, the public religion, the customs 
 and fashions of the Romans of Virgil's day, were 
 Roman but, the science, the aesthetics, the ethics, 
 the reasoned individual faith of the time, were bor- 
 rowed almost entirely from Greece. To capture the 
 Roman world, the poet must fuse and blend both. 
 The secret of the new school at Rome to which Virgil 
 belonged was to give fresh value to the exotic flower 
 and fruit by grafting them on a hardy, native stock; to 
 lend a richer hue and fragrance to the wilding rose, 
 first by this impregnation, and then by the most 
 careful selection and pruning of the resulting garden- 
 plant. In this art Virgil was a consummate master. 
 Indeed his triumph is to have achieved the result 
 
AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATK >N 13 
 
 more completely than any one else. If tl. may 
 
 be compared to the gardener* Virgil is the greatest 
 gardener in literature. 
 
 No one, figuratively, grew more glorious garden- 
 blooms than he, outvying even the famed "rosaries 
 of Paestum." It is not without significance that he 
 lias painted for us in the Georgics a picture of a garden. 
 He intended to have written a separate Georgic on 
 Gardening. - ! - He has given us the vignette of the 
 Coryciiis senex. The Georgics may be called a sort 
 of Earthly Paradise. The flower garden and the 
 kitchen garden, the landscape, the terrace, the wild 
 plot, the parterre, the alley, the bush, the tree, the 
 rock, the maze, the lake, the cascade, the statue, the 
 vase, all the "dainty devices" of the cultivator who 
 bends nature to his purpose, he can use them all; 
 nor is the beehive in the corner forgotten. 
 
 But Virgil has a deeper and a grander aim. To 
 "cultivate his garden" is not enough. Nature is not 
 to be studied only for utilitarian ends. He desires 
 to understand both this world and the next, to find 
 salvation in both. 
 
 Politically, peace for mankind was to be found in 
 the Roman rule, and indeed it was so found in "the 
 majesty of the Pax Romanar The Empire which 
 had been I'epee was to be la paix. 
 
 Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; 
 Hae iibi em tit artes ; pacisque imponere morem, 
 Parcere subject is et debet tare super bos 1 
 
 * cf. Tennyson's "Amphion" and "The Flower. 1 ' 
 t Georgic iv, 116 — et seqq. 
 
14 VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 Personally, and for the soul, it was to be found in 
 the doctrine of "the Soul of the Word," the belief that 
 we men are tiny sparks of the one, pure, divine fire, 
 and that after the cares and contagion of this trouble- 
 some world we are to be reunited and resumed into 
 the ineffable being of the immanent God who fills, 
 and is, the universe. 
 
 What then is the highest human virtue? 
 
 It is flietas, loving duty, dutiful love ; to accept, with 
 the heart and head together, the divine order in things 
 great and small, the law of the gods alike of "hearth 
 and heaven," Penates et magni Di. 
 
 Virgil's hero for better and for worse is Pius 
 Aeneas* 
 
 Something of the same kind is to be found in 
 Tennyson's Idylls of the King, which has many affi- 
 nities with the Aeneid. Arthur, we are told, is not 
 merely the legendary Celtic King. He is also the 
 human soul at war with the passions.-]- It is further 
 suggested in the Dedication that there is no small 
 resemblance between the "ideal knight" of the Id) Us 
 and Prince Albert, "Albert the Good." All this gives 
 a certain allegorical character to the Idylls, some- 
 thing like that of the " Faery Queen," whose eponym 
 Spenser found in the Queen and Empress Elizabeth, 
 and Disraeli again in the Queen and Empress Victoria. 
 There is a similar element of allegory in Pius Aeneas. 
 A clever, if flippant undergraduate of my day described 
 
 * Quel giusto 
 
 Figliuol d'Anchise. — Inferno I, 7$. 
 t "shadowing Sense at war with Soul, 
 
 Ideal manhood closed in real man.'' — Tennyson's lines 
 
 " To the Queen" at the end of the Idylls. 
 
AND THE HISTORY I IF CIVILIZATION 15 
 
 King Arthur as a "blameless prig." That is not alto- 
 gether fair to Arthur, but is not altogether unfair to 
 Pins Aeneas. 
 
 The real justification of pictas, the deeper si' 
 the Aeneidy the real key and clue, are to be found in 
 the Sixth Book, as that of the Idylls in the Idyll of 
 the "Holy Grail." This Book contains the fusion 
 of two worlds, the seen, and the unseen. When 
 Aeneas has visited the world below, he is to be 
 reconciled to, and to be able to deal with, the world 
 of Earth. 
 
 Is his visit a dream, and a false dream, or a reality? 
 
 We are left uncertain. The return to earth is 
 made, significantly, through the ivory gate. 
 
 But whichever he meant, it was Virgil's vast task 
 to find an inner faith and sanction for the hard, 
 practical, conquering Roman, and for the Roman 
 Empire, and for this task he was strangely prepared 
 and fitted. 
 
 He was a peasant, or at any rate, the son of a pea- 
 sant, he was a man of the people, and also a court 
 favourite; a patriot and a patronized poetdaureate 
 He was, shall we say? like the brilliant son of a Welsh 
 farmer who had been sent to Oxford. He sang, as 
 he said himself, pascua, rura, duces, of flocks and fields 
 and warrior Kings. 
 
 Virgil is indeed a paradox among poets. He is to 
 
 celebrate the Roman Empire. It has barely been 
 
 established and by the sword, when already, though 
 
 Virgil only dimly divined its full implication, it is 
 
 the "Hol) r " Roman* Empire, for it was this "Holy 
 
 * The name or epithet "Augustus" itself probably means "holy" 
 or "dedicated/' 
 
1 6 VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 Empire," as its historian says "that the crafty nephew 
 of Julius won for himself, against the powers of the 
 East, beneath the cliffs of Actium."* 
 
 Truly, in Virgil, out of the lion came honey, and out 
 of the strong came forth sweetness. While Augustus 
 worked, Virgil waited and watched. While Augustus 
 battled, Virgil brooded, and blessed.j- It is the part 
 of the poet. As M. Andre Chevrillon points out,+ 
 Tennyson, and Kipling the successor of Tennyson, 
 have done something of the same kind in England for 
 the last, and the present generation. They have found 
 a faith for the British Empire. 
 
 Virgil's poems all exhibit the same character, the 
 same ingredients, the same elements blended in the 
 same strange, various richness, but they are on an 
 ascending scale of grandeur and complexity. 
 
 Can we at all reconstruct the world in which Virgil 
 moved? 
 
 What was it like? For the ordinary English reader 
 the answer is ready to hand. It was the world of the 
 New Testament. The best picture of the Roman 
 Empire in its daily life, both outward and inward, is 
 to be found in the Acts of the Apostles. That mar- 
 vellous and masterly narrative gives us a plain, 
 unvarnished, vivid, truthful portraiture of life as it 
 went forward upon the shores of the Mediterranean, 
 in Palestine, Greece and Italy, in the days before 
 Christianity, the days of which Virgil is the most 
 complete spiritual and artistic interpreter and prophet. 
 
 * Lord Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, the opening paragraph. 
 
 t Georgic IV. 559— end. 
 
 X Andre Chevrillon, Trois Etudes dc littiraturc Auglaise. 
 
AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION \J 
 
 In its pagi s are to be seen all the types and factors of 
 Virgil's day, excepting that in Virgil's time the Em- 
 pire was still in the making, in the days of St. Paul it 
 was an established fact. The physical scenery is the 
 
 same, as the traveller makes his way by mountain, 
 river and plain, across sunny or stormy seas, by island 
 and harbour, or along some famous Roman road. 
 And the spiritual scenery and setting are the same 
 too. Take that most notable scene in the Acts, 
 St. Paul at Athens, portrayed by Raphael in his 
 famous cartoon. Virgil had been at Athens too, and 
 at not so very long an interval before, only the space 
 of an ordinary life, some seventy years. A greybeard 
 of eighty, one of those Epicurean philosophers who 
 sat on the Areopagus, still ea^er to hear some "new 
 thing," the dernier cri in speculative thought, might 
 have remembered seeing the famous rich Roman poet- 
 laureate of his childhood, a figure in the train of the 
 Emperor, to be stricken down a little later with sudden 
 fever, known too, it is not improbable, by personal 
 visits to the Garden and the teachers of his own sect. 
 For Athens had not greatly changed ; the philosophic 
 sects with their Colleges, Walks, Gardens and Porticoes 
 were still the same, and their views were still the views 
 which, as has been noted, Virgil and Horace and their 
 fellows had heard in the lecture-rooms of their pre- 
 decessors at Rome or when they came to Athens, 
 "Inter silvas Acadttni quaerere verum."* 
 
 Who were St. Paul's hearers and hecklers? "Certain 
 philosophers of the Epicureans and Stoics." Who was 
 
 * To hunt for Truth in Maudlin's learned Grove. — 
 
 Pofe : Imitation of Horace Ep. II, ii. 
 
I 8 VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 the poet whom he cites as "one of your own?" Aratus, 
 to whom both Virgil and his forerunner Lucretius owe 
 so much. "For we are also his offspring," he quotes, 
 as elsewhere he quotes the epicurean motto, common 
 to Isaiah and Horace, "Let us eat and drink for to- 
 morrow we die." 
 
 This then is the world in which, and these are the 
 prevailing tenets amid which, Virgil, a true seeker 
 after God, was groping, "if haply he might feel after 
 and find him." 
 
 For to Virgil this was the greatest matter of all, and 
 this it is indeed, which forms a large part of the 
 mystery and the pathos of Virgil. 
 
 He could not be content with any creed, or with no 
 creed, with the superficial acceptance, the superstition 
 and idolatry, of the unquestioning masses, or with the 
 negative creed accepted, by Lucretius with melancholy 
 enthusiasm, with sensual and brutal indifference by 
 Memmius, and with the worldling's insouciance by 
 Horace. 
 
 Virgil's relation to Lucretius is very interesting. 
 Lucretius' tenets, as everyone knows, were the tenets 
 of his intellectual hero Epicurus. In these tenets 
 Virgil too had been brought up. Like Horace, he 
 could say that he had been taught that the gods lived 
 aloof, "lying beside their nectar" and caring nought 
 for men. "Jews might believe, not Romans." 
 Crcda t Ju d( icus Apel/a, 
 
 Non ego, namque deos didici securum agere aevum. — 
 
 Hor. S. I, V., ioo. 
 
AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION l<> 
 
 All know the splendid passage in the I i about 
 
 Lucretius — beginning 
 
 Felix, qui potuit tenon cognoseere causas. — 
 
 < rE< >RGIC II, 49O. 
 "And he was happy, if to know 
 Causes of things, ami tar b 
 His feet to see the lurid flow 
 
 Of terror and insane distress, 
 And headlong fate, be happiness." — 
 
 M. Arnold, "Memorial Verses." 
 
 But Virgil does not, and could not, rest content with 
 this negation. His was one of those "swift souls that 
 yearn for light." 
 
 "Ah sure within him and without, 
 Could his dark wisdom find it out, 
 There must be answer to his doubt." 
 
 He yearned to find the truth, the ultimate secret of 
 the universe. He intended, when he had finished the 
 Aeneid, to devote the rest of his life to "philosophy," 
 that is, to science and religion. He was cut off before 
 he could do so. It is a tragic record. His earliest 
 poem had been upon the theme of a shepherd saved 
 from a marsh snake by a gnat. By a strange irony 
 it was the malaria mosquito that killed him as he was 
 finishing the Aeneid. 
 
 He sought the light only to sigh out life as he 
 found it, 
 
 Quaesivit caelo lucem ingemuitque reperta. — Aen. IV, 692. 
 
 Italy, it must be remembered, was, to the ancients, 
 "Hesperia" the "Western World," and it is indeed in 
 Jtaly that the real western world, to-day, as of old, in 
 one direction be«ins, and in the other ends. 
 
20 VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 It has been the part of Rome, it is still her part, 
 perhaps it will be her part yet more in the future, to 
 link together the ancient and the modern civilizations, 
 Paganism and Christianity, to stand between Babylon 
 and Jerusalem, Troy and Athens, cm the one hand and 
 London and Paris, Berlin and Madrid on the other. 
 
 Virgil, the great poet of Rome, more than any other 
 single man or mind, effects the spiritual portion of this 
 liaison. He came at the right moment, he enjoyed 
 the experience, he possessed the education and the 
 genius requisite. He knew the ground, he knew Italy, 
 from the confines of Italian Gaul on which he was 
 born, to Magna Graecia, where he sojourned ; he knew 
 Greece, and probably the Levant. He had experience 
 both of the Republic and the Empire, and was the 
 contemporary, as boy and man, of all Rome's very 
 greatest figures, of Caesar and Pompey, Antony and 
 Augustus, Cicero and Maecenas, Lucretius, Catullus, 
 and Horace. 
 
 He was an immense student, familiar with all the 
 range of Greek art and thought, poetry and philos- 
 ophy. He could absorb it all and hand it on in a new, 
 individual form and language, for before transmitting 
 it he made it all his own. 
 
 He is the most imitative — fortunate is it for the 
 part he was to play that he is so — yet at times, the 
 most original poet in the world. I began this lecture 
 by noting how the surge and roar of Garda still echo 
 in his lines. Not Wordsworth's "Loud is the Vale" 
 is more spontaneous or true. 
 
 Sir Archibald Geikie has shown in detail how 
 equally vivid and true to nature is his description of 
 
AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 21 
 
 the breaker on the Italian beach. Here he is like 
 Horn t. i ist as Tennyson is like Homer, because both 
 
 are like eternal nature, and things which arc equal to 
 the same thing are (unless Einstein has changed all 
 that) equal to one another. 
 
 He imitates Theocritus, but he knew the shepherd 
 and the goat-herd, the boor and the belle of the coun- 
 tryside, for himself. He imitates Hesiod and Aratus, 
 but he knew the star and the soil, the arable and the 
 pasture, the forest and the marsh, the stud and the 
 stock, the beasts and birds and bees, the wolf, the fox 
 and the mole; the goose, the crane and the crow; the 
 snake, the lizard and the frog; for himself. He imitates 
 Homer — and here, perhaps, his experience fell short. 
 He had not seen the Homeric battle or the Homeric 
 life. But he was nearer them than we are. 
 
 He had studied his Sophocles and his Apollonius 
 Rhodius. Dido recalls both Ajax and Medea, but 
 Dido is no echo nor Camilla either, and Virgil had 
 done what Homer had not, he had lived in the days 
 of Clodia and Cleopatra. 
 
 And there is something, for better and for worse, 
 in Virgil which Homer does not possess. Homer is 
 often not fully understood. He is not barbarous or 
 rude or uncultured: he is artistic, even artificial. 
 He presents the picture of a life highly, and deeply 
 civilized. 
 
 But in Virgil there is something more still There 
 is the note of mysticism. There is nuance, there is 
 double meaning, there is other-worldliness. Nothing 
 is more significant than this. It pervades all his 
 writing. 
 
22 VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 The Eclogues or Bucolics are, in name and in fact, 
 an extraordinary mixture of originality and artifi- 
 ciality, of " simplicite and simplesse" of the first-hand 
 and the second-hand, of personal observation and 
 heartfelt emotion, with touches and adornments bor- 
 rowed from every previous writer. 
 
 The inise en scene is half mirage, half matter of fact. 
 It is Lombardy and Sicily at once. Amaryllis and 
 Neaera, half country lasses, are mixed with Nymphs 
 and Naiads. Milton, in his Elizabethan youth, in his 
 early, happy, semi-cavalier pieces, shows something of 
 the same blending, and Tennyson has it too in more 
 than one of his earlier youthful poems. 
 
 But the paradox is strongest in Virgil. Amid all 
 his artificiality there is something in him that speaks 
 to the soul in all ages and in its deeper moods. Pan 
 and the "Old Man o' the Woods" and the "Sister 
 Nymphs" are for him country deities who have a 
 revelation of their own to be placed over against 
 that of Epicurus and Lucretius.* 
 
 The tipsy Satyr, when he is caught and bound 
 with flowers by the laughing shepherds, Silenus, 
 whose very name is a byword, sings a philosophic 
 poem, the story of creation, and tries to solve the 
 riddle of the painful earth. He sings "how the world 
 was made, how the atoms in the vasty void were 
 drawn together and formed the elements, earth and 
 the air of heaven, and the sea, and the fluent flame, 
 how these were the beginning of all things, and how, 
 from these, the orb of the world, at first soft and 
 viscous, was compacted, how gradually the hard 
 
 * Georgic ii, Afi^ctsqq. Fortunatus et ille 
 
AND THE HISTORY I >i CIVILIZ V TH >N 23 
 
 earth grew from this and was distinguished from the 
 deep, how the sun came, a new deity, to rule the sky, 
 and the clouds retired and the rain fell from an ever 
 higher heaven, how man was created, and the Golden 
 
 Age drew on, and how then Prometheus stole the 
 fire of Jove and was punished by the vulture." 
 
 In another Eclogue^ as all know, there are visions 
 and prophecies that the fust age of man's innocency 
 will return, and the Virgin of Righteousness will 
 tread the earth once more, unafraid, when a Heavenlv 
 Babe shall be born, and the lion and the ox shall 
 feed and lie down together. No wonder that later 
 eras read into Virgil the strange divinings of a saint 
 and seer, and that the Christian Church, which had 
 from the first welcomed the testimony of natural 
 religion to the brotherhood of man and the father- 
 hood of God, found in him something which it would 
 fain appropriate and sanctify. 
 
 At the moment, hower, Virgil was discovered and 
 annexed for more immediate and material ends. 
 The Eclogues took the town. To-day they would 
 have been filmed, perhaps by the Government as 
 "back to the land" propaganda, and we should have 
 had Mopsus and Menalcas on the cinematic stage. 
 In Rome of the early empire they could only be 
 presented as a sort of revue. But they were put on 
 the stage, and there is a pretty story that when Virgil 
 looked into the theatre the whole audience rose to its 
 feet and cheered for Caesar and Virgil. 
 
 Follio, the literary statesman, was "charmed with 
 the rustic Muse"* which was so true and so popular, 
 
 * Eclogue iii, 84. 
 
24 VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 and the rulers saw and suggested how Virgil's genius 
 might be utilized. 
 
 The result was the Gcorgics. 
 
 Again Virgil, but now on a greater scale, mingled 
 earth and heaven, mirage and reality, science and art. 
 Again, and more powerfully, he images the unseen 
 world in the old Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, 
 into which he pours his own observation of nature 
 and his own emotion over the death of the young. 
 
 The Gcorgics are very fine, and still more, very 
 perfect, poetry. They display many, if not quite all, 
 the notes in Virgil's gamut, his pathos and his rhe- 
 toric, his command, at once of the clearest distinction 
 and the subtlest suggestion, of realism and roman- 
 ticism, precision and nuance, above all, his marvellous 
 music. The struggle for existence, alike of the strong 
 and the weak, the wondrous achievement of man, the 
 possibilities open to his industry and his daring, the 
 charm and potency of economy, rural and domestic, 
 the growth of the state, the praise, the love of Italy, 
 the insanity of war and party strife, the golden vision 
 of peace, the wisdom and duty, of loyalty to Caesar 
 and his star, all are here. 
 
 They are too, as all know, highly finished in their 
 workmanship, notwithstanding the strange fact that 
 the last was completely transformed from its original 
 design. Only those who do not like perfection, and 
 there are many such, do not like them. 
 
 But it is the Acneid that makes Virgil's real great- 
 ness and that sets him among the super-poets. And 
 perhaps the chief reason is just this, that his Epic 
 sums up the spirit of a great empire, that it is the very 
 
AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 25 
 
 voice of ancienl Italy and eternal Rome. How came 
 it to be written? "On n'ex/cute que mal ce qu'on n',i 
 pas concn soi-mime? is the imm< >rtal saying of Charli >tte 
 Corday. Is the Aeneid an exception? Is it a com- 
 manded poem? It was written, in a sense, to order, 
 l>nt it was, and perhaps Augustus knew this, an early, 
 first love of the poet's own. As a young poet, he had 
 planned an Epic, in twelve hooks, on "kings and 
 battles" the tale of the rise of Rome, but "Apollo 
 twitched his ear," and bade him hesitate. 
 
 Much the same is the story, some may remember, 
 of Tennyson's Idylls. The early "Morte d s Arthur' 1 
 represents the beginning of an Epic in twelve books 
 on the rise of Britain and the wars of Arthur. Just 
 now the Idylls are out of fashion with the critics, 
 though not with the uncritical masses, even as Virgil 
 was out of fashion in certain highbrovved circles in the 
 generation after his death, though not with the masses. 
 
 But though he died before he had satisfied himself, 
 and wished to have the Aeneid burnt at his death, it 
 achieved its end at once, more rapidly and completely 
 perhaps, than any known poem of the same magnitude. 
 What is its character, and what its secret? 
 Love thou thy land, with love far-brought 
 From out the storied Past, and used 
 Within the Present, but transfused 
 Thro 1 future time by power of thought. 
 
 Virgil's love of Italy and Rome, as it speaks in the 
 Aeneid has all these three characters. He tells the 
 story of Rome's far off beginnings, of her colossal 
 conflict for the rule of the world; he introduces, with 
 extraordinary skill, her present greatness; and foretells 
 her long meridian of glory. 
 
26 VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 The fall of Troy, the secular hate of Carthage, the 
 exploits of the republican heroes, Alba and the in- 
 fant Rome, the battle of Actium, all are brought in. 
 The whole of Italy, the islands of the Levant, Egypt, 
 the East, are alluded to, just as by skilful touches, the 
 heroes of the Homeric poems, Diomede and Ulysses 
 are introduced into the thread of the narrative. 
 
 But it is the meek who shall inherit the earth. The 
 "grandeur that was Rome" is worthily reflected in 
 Virgil. No one sounds her triumphs with more clear 
 or immortalizing voice. But there was another note 
 known perhaps better to the proud Roman than to the 
 livelier, and lighter Greek, though known to him too, 
 the transiency of triumphs. Did not the slave ride in 
 the conqueror's car to remind him that he was mortal? 
 Virgil was the voice of Rome, and of proud Rome, 
 a proud voice, but a voice with tears in it too. 
 
 What is his most famous, his most Virgilian, his 
 most untranslatable line? It is the line that tells of 
 the tears, the idle tears, that wait on fame, and on the 
 contemplation of man's great, yet little, lot. 
 
 Sunt hie etiam sua praemia /audi, 
 Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt — 
 
 Aen. I, 461-2. 
 
 Here too is the guerdon of glory • ah ! where is our valour 
 
 not sung ? 
 But here too are tears for man's story, and hearts by 
 
 mortality wrung '. 
 
 Virgil everywhere has praise for human achievement 
 and for man in his strength, but tears also, it may be 
 proud tears, for human failure, tears alike for friend 
 and foe, tears for Polydorus, for Dido, for Marcellus; 
 
AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 2f 
 
 for Camilla and Lausus no less than for Nisus and 
 Euryalus and the incomparable Pallas: 
 
 \ . alias hint ad lacrimas eadem horrida belli 
 
 Fata vocant; salve aeternum mi/ii, maxume Palla, 
 
 Aeternutnque vale. Ai \. XI, 96-99. 
 
 Us to new tears the old aire destinies 
 
 Of warfare summon still ; Hail, gallant Pallas, 
 ]-]>rever! and forever fate thee well! 
 
 The poets are best understood by the poets, and 
 perhaps the greatest by the greatest. I began with 
 Goethe's appreciation. I pass to a greater than 
 Goethe. Dante's relation to Virgil is one of the 
 transcendent things in literature. Its general features 
 are well known, but its minute and detailed value is 
 not always noted. 
 
 What did Dante find in Virgil? These main things 
 — a love of Italy, a glorious style, a pagan piety, 
 a belief in an under-world and after life, a picture of 
 Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, a belief in a Holy, 
 a divinely appointed, Empire of Rome over the world. 
 
 And these remain the great notes of Virgil. They 
 are the notes brought out by that other great poet 
 of empire, our own Tennyson, in that marvellous Ode 
 "written at the request of the Mantuans" for the nine- 
 tenth centenary of their great poet's death. 
 
 In ten successive stanzas, with a music and magic 
 of phrase and diction, which are the very counterpart 
 of Virgil's own, Tennyson touches off the charac- 
 teristics of the ancient master, his theme and his 
 manner, his poetry and philosophy, his grandeur and 
 his gentleness, his wistfulness and his glamour. 
 
28 VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 It was no late-born or light predilection that in- 
 spired these lines, it was the love of a life-time. This 
 Tennyson told me himself, as he tells it to the world 
 in his Ode. 
 
 "/ that loved thee since my day began" 
 
 It may be read in many pages in his poems: 
 "At procul in sola secret ae Troades acta 
 Amissum Anchisen flebatit, cunctaeque profundum 
 Pontum adspectabant flentes. ' Heu tot vada fessis, 
 Et tatitum superesse maris' vox omnibus una. 
 Urbem or ant, taedet pelagi perferre labor em." — 
 
 Aen. V, 612 — 16. 
 
 "They sat them down upon the yellow sand, 
 Betzveen the sun and moon upon the shore: 
 And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland, 
 Of child, and wife, and slave ; but ever more 
 Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar, 
 Weary the wandering fields of barren foam. 
 Then some one said. "We will returti no more;" 
 And all at o?ice they sang "Our island home 
 Is far beyond the wave: we will no longer roam." 
 
 — The Lotus Eaters. 
 
 Cum subito e silvis made confecta suprema 
 Ignoti nova forma viri miserandaque cultu 
 Trocedit, supplexque manus ad litora tendit. 
 Respicimus: dira illuvies inmissaque barba, 
 Consertum tegumen spinis, at cetera Grains." — 
 
 Aen. Ill, 590—5. 
 
 Downward from his mountain grove, 
 
 Slept the long-hair 'd long-bearded solitary, 
 Brown, looking hardly human, strangely clad. — 
 
 Enoch Arden. 
 
AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 2>j 
 
 The resemblance Is general, and one rather of the 
 affinity of kindred spirits than of deliberate imitation. 
 
 But Tennyson himself gave me, as an instan 
 his own wonderful expression — "All the charm of all 
 the Muses often flowering in a lonely word," the phrase 
 — cunctantem ratuunt. I did not at the moment 
 remember that he had himself written "the lithe 
 reluctant bough." 
 
 Do you recollect the stanza in the "Dream of Fair 
 Women"— 
 
 " Corpses across the threshold, heroes tail 
 Dislodging pinnacle and parapet 
 Upon the tortoise creeping to the wall, 
 Lances in ambush set?" 
 It is a vignette almost in the original words from 
 the Second A cue id. 
 
 "Sic Martem indomitum Danaosque ad tecta ruenles, 
 Ceruimus, obsessumque acta testudine linien. 
 Haerent parietibus scalae, postesque sub ipsos 
 Nituntur gradibus, ciipeosque ad tela sinisiris 
 Protecti objiciunt, prensant fastigia dextris, 
 Dardanidae contra turres ac tecta domoruni 
 Culmina convellunt." — Aen. II, 440 — 7. 
 But another young English poet had earlier been 
 fired, as indeed thousands of boys have doubtless 
 been, by the same picture. 
 " The woes of Troy, towers smothering o'r their blaze, 
 Stiff-holden shields, far-piercing spears, keen blades, 
 Struggling, and blood, and shrieks." — Exdymion II, 8-9. 
 Keat knew his Virgil much better than is generally 
 recognized. He made, we are told, in youth a tran- 
 slation of the Aeneid, and he alludes to, and borrows 
 from it again and acrain. 
 
30 VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 " Tho' Dido silent is in andergrove " 
 he writes, in "Isabella," and he mentions her "grief" 
 again, in the " Imitation of Spenser," while he also 
 makes more than one allusion in his letters to the 
 "Sibyl's leaves in Virgil." 
 
 He too notes Virgil's alternation between the grand 
 and the sad. In the poor, early, yet significant poem, 
 the 'Ode to Apollo,' after speaking of Homer vaguely 
 as the poet of war, he writes dully, but with know- 
 ledge, of Virgil : — 
 
 Then through thy Temple wide, melodious swells 
 
 The sweet majestic tone of Maro's lyre 
 The soul delighted on each accent dtvells — 
 
 Enraptured dtvells — not daring to respire, 
 The while he tells of grief around a funeral pyre: 
 the allusion in the last line being doubtless to the 
 funeral of Pallas, already referred to in this lecture. 
 But what has not been noticed is that he makes 
 a far more serious and important borrowing, the bor- 
 rowing of a faith. In the memorable letter on "Soul- 
 making," which he writes to George and Georgiana 
 Keats, in which he tries to beat out and explain his 
 ideas of the nature of the Soul and the Intelligence, 
 and their relation to God, he says, that the Intelligence 
 is a spark of the divinity, but that it does not become 
 a soul till, by its earthly experience it acquires an 
 Identity. At death this spark returns to God. 
 This doctrine is the central doctrine of Eiulymion 
 "Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks 
 Our ready minds to fellotvship divine, 
 A fellowship with Essence till we shine 
 Full alchemised and free of space. Behold 
 The clear religion of Heaven." — Endymion I, 766. 
 
AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 31 
 
 Keats himself, in ;i letter to his publisher John 
 Taylor,says that he had spent much tim<: and trouble 
 over this passage. "My having written that argu- 
 ment," he says, "will perhaps be of the greatest service 
 to me of anything I ever did.'" 
 
 But where did Keats find this "clear religion?" 
 
 He found it in Virgil. It is the doctrine of the 
 Anima Mundi, set out, as all know, in a famous 
 passage in the Sixth Aeneid. 
 
 And whence did Virgil get it? From his Greek 
 teachers. He and Horace both learnt it in the class- 
 room. Horace treated it jestingly, as he treated at 
 times many things human and divine. He describes 
 how indigestion, the result of yesterday's debauch, 
 clogs the mind as well as the body, 
 Qui/i cot pus onustum 
 Hestertiis vitiis animum quoque praegravat una, 
 Atque adfigit Jiunw divinae particulam aurae. — 
 
 Sat. II, 2. 76 — 9. 
 Virgil treated it seriously. He was a genuine seeker 
 after God, and he desired to find a faith for himself 
 and others. 
 
 Pope's employment of the idea is akin to Virgil's. 
 '• / 'ital spark of Heavenly fix me 
 
 Quit, quit, this mortal frame" 
 
 Byron's, in "Don Juan" is akin to that of Horace. 
 It is a curious coincidence that Byron should intro- 
 duce it a propos of Keats himself in the well known 
 lines about the Quarterly Review, 
 
 "Strange that the soul, that very fiery particle 
 Should let itself be snuffed out by an article" 
 
32 VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 For it may safely be said that Byron neither knew 
 nor cared what Keats' own creed was, and would 
 never have credited him with any knowledge of the 
 classics, though, by another coincidence, Keats was 
 very nearly being sent to school at Harrow. 
 
 To this doctrine then Keats attached great import- 
 ance. It was, for the time at any rate, very real to 
 him. He thought it, he writes, a "grander system of 
 salvation than the Christian religion." He thought it 
 would explain difficulties which Christians labour 
 under, for instance, the salvation of children. This 
 he did not draw from Virgil. 
 
 Dante knew his Virgil better. He did not indeed 
 introduce the doctrine of the Aniuia Mundi, though 
 he may have sublimated it in a sense, in his account 
 of Purgatory and Paradise. But he did not forget 
 the infants, or Virgil's tender-heartedness and gentle- 
 ness. 
 
 Homer, for Dante, as for Keats, wears the sword 
 of force and sovereignty, but Virgil is for Dante as 
 truly "gentle Virgil"* as Sophocles for the Athenians 
 was "gentle Sophocles" or Shakespeare for Ben Jon- 
 son "gentle Shakespeare." He is the "Amma cortcsc 
 Manlovana." 
 
 But he is more than this. One of the most famous 
 passages in Virgil's picture of the underworld is the 
 description of the heartpiercing sound which is the 
 first to be heard as the daring invader lands on the 
 unearthly shore, the wailing of the infant souls who 
 have died untimely before they enjoyed life. 
 
 * E quell' ombra gentil, per cui si noma 
 Pietoia piu che villa Manlovana. — Purg. xviit, S2 — S. 
 
AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 33 
 
 It is with them— coi parvoli innocently with the 
 innocent little ones, neither in Earth, nor Heaven, 
 neither in Hell, nor Purgatory, but in Limbo, that 
 Dante fixes Virgil's own eternal lot. 
 
 A relation of mine, a lady deeply versed in Dante, 
 has stressed this (joint by making it the theme of 
 a touching sonnet. 
 
 She heads it with two quotations, one from Dante 
 himself, one from Virgil: — 
 
 QUIVI STO IO COI PARVOLI INNOCENTI. 
 
 Purg. vii., jr. 
 
 Sunt lacrymae rerum. 
 
 O Christian Poet', by the cruel creed 
 
 Of an unchristlike, dark theology, 
 
 Forced to adjudge the sinner's destiny 
 To him, the pure in spirit, mild in deed, 
 Your friend, who came to help you in your need: 
 
 Wherefore through ways of Hell and Purgatory 
 
 You followed him with bowed head, reverently, 
 As though your sorrow would for pardon plead. 
 Your own compassion taught you his. That fine, 
 Magnanimous and kindred poet-soul 
 
 } 'ou knew : you knew his chastened heart would share 
 Homer's pale doom, shut out from grace divine, 
 
 Unmurmuring. One cry bioke from control — 
 " The innocent — the children — they are there l" 
 
 It is obviously impossible to do justice to Virgil in 
 one brief lecture. There are ever so many topics, 
 points and stories which might be touched on. There 
 is the beautiful story of St. Paul visiting his tomb, and 
 indeed, St. Paul must have been very near it, for it lay 
 on the branch road from Puteoli to Naples, and, as 
 
34 VIRGIL, ROME 
 
 will be remembered it was at Puteoli that St. Paul 
 landed after his famous voyage, to pass perhaps over 
 this very track, joining in any case, later, the great 
 Appian highway, that Dover Road of Italy, with its 
 historic milestones, stopping-places and hostelries, at 
 which, like Virgil and Horace, if a less fashionable 
 traveller, than they, he too could arrange to meet his 
 friends. 
 
 There are many stories current in the Middle Ages 
 
 about Virgil's powers as a magician. There is the 
 
 pathetic Oxford story of the ill-starred King Charles, 
 
 fato profngus, making trial of the Sortes Vergilianae 
 
 at the Bodleian. 
 
 There are too ever so many stories hinging on 
 quotations from Virgil made alike in ancient and 
 modern times. I might give you specimens, few or 
 many of the ''Beauties of Virgil." But you must read 
 him for yourselves. How then shall you read him? 
 An endless literature began to grow up about Virgil 
 directly he was dead, if not before, and it is still grow- 
 ing. It is very significant of his imperial vogue that 
 the first really good commentary on Virgil was pro- 
 duced in Syria, and that the best portrait preserved 
 of him is a fine mosaic found at Tunis, near the site 
 of the ancient Carthage where his Aeneas had seen 
 his own a thousand years earlier: 
 
 Se quoque pri/icipibus permixtum agnovit Achivis. — 
 
 AfcNElD I, 488. 
 
 Much has been done recently to elucidate and 
 illuminate the personality and the poetry of Virgil. 
 In particular, the value of the so-called Appendix 
 Vergil2an<i,\\\z minor poems preserved under his name, 
 
ami THE HISTORY < ll I l\ [LIZATION 35 
 
 has been exhaustively explored by scholars, in 1 1 
 
 many, in his own Italy, and, not least, in England. 
 
 We sec him now, as we see almost all ports, if we 
 
 look carefully, not an isolated figure, but like Shake- 
 speare, or Dante, or Victor Hugo, or Tennyson, or 
 Browning, or Rossetti and William Morris, one of 
 a youthful poetic coterie, giving and taking, suggesting 
 
 and interchanging, encouraging, and criticizing. We 
 see him, like Tennyson, borrowing in age from his 
 own youth. The ideas again, the customs, the cults, 
 the religion as well as the realities, of the Rome of 
 his day, have been recovered, both by the spade and 
 by the comparative method, and we can place Virgil 
 in his true perspective and setting. 
 
 Oxford and Cambridge alike have done much in 
 the past for Virgilian study. It is only necessary, 
 if indeed it is necessary, to mention the names of 
 Conington, Nettleship, and Haverfield; of Dr. Mackail 
 and Mr. J. Jackson ; of Kennedy, Sidgwick, F. \V. H. 
 Myers; of Mr. T. E. Page, and Dr. T. R. Glover; of 
 Professor Phillimore and Professor Conway. Nor 
 ought the contribution of Professor Sellar from Scot- 
 land and Dr. Henry from Ireland to be forgotten in 
 any account of English Virgilian Scholarship. Much 
 is being done at this moment by the authors of the 
 striking series of Virgilian Studies, published by Mr. 
 Blackwell, here in Oxford. Mr. Sargeaunt, Mr. Royds, 
 Miss Crump, Professor H. E. Butler, have each contri- 
 buted their share. But none of them, they would all 
 say, has done as much as he, who was their chief and 
 their inspirer, that truly fine and ripe Oxford scholar, 
 so modest, so sincere, so thorough, the doyen of 
 
$6 VIRGIL. 
 
 Roman studies in Oxford, whom we miss parti- 
 cularly at this gathering, but whose spirit pervades 
 our proceedings, that equal lover and student of 
 natural and human history, of natural and human 
 music, the late Dr. William Warde Fowler. 
 
 It is obvious that you cannot read all this literature 
 at once, perhaps ever. Let me commend as a selec- 
 tion, the edition with notes, of Mr. T. E. Page, the 
 translations in verse of Dryden and William Morris, 
 and, for the Georgics, of R. D. Blackmore, the author 
 of "Lorna Doone," who had the advantage of being 
 a market-gardener, as well as a poet and an Oxford 
 scholar: in prose, of Conington, Dr. Mackail, and Mr. J. 
 Jackson, and the criticism of F. W. H. Myers, of Dr. 
 Mackail, and Mr. H. W. Garrod, and, if you would go 
 further, Professor Domenico Comparetti's invaluable 
 volumn "Virgil in the Middle Ages." 
 
 Such then is Virgil, one of the most appealing 
 figures and spirits in all history. He is great and 
 glorious, but he is also gentle and tender, brilliantly 
 successful, yet ever humble ; praised, patronized, 
 petted by princes, but all unspoilt ; anima Candida, 
 a "white soul" as Horace called him, anima natiu aliter 
 Christiana, as the Church has recognized him. He 
 links the republic with the empire, he links Rome 
 with Italy. He stands between two worlds, the an- 
 cient and the modern. Musical, magical, mystical, 
 there is something unearthly about his gentle splen- 
 dour, like that of the moon which reflects at once the 
 parting and the coming sun, shining at times as bright 
 as day, at times pale and spectral, always with its 
 weird shadows and suggestions, and its strange, still 
 beauty. 
 
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 AENEAS AT THE SITE OF ROME. Beii 
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 VIRGIL AND ISAIAH. A study of Ti With 
 
 Text, Notes, and Translations into English Verse and into Old 
 Testament English. 
 
 If "Delightfully discursive and full of interesting i ition 
 
 suggestive inferences." — The W 
 
 By M. M. CRUMP, M.A. * 
 
 THE GROWTH OF THE AENEID. 
 
 If "The subject might be considered a dry one 
 her arguments with such skill and pei 
 
 1 with such animation, that no reader will regret the time he may 
 spend over it." — The West' 
 
 By Prof. H. E. BUTLER. 
 THE SIXTH BOOK OF THE AENEID. 
 
 ^ "Excellent and almost always helpful ... no whit less in 
 nist than its predi 
 The Glasgow JJ 
 
 OXFORD 
 
621003 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 U. C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES 
 
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