1x 18.667 -B UNIVERSITY MORLEY'S UNIVERSAL LIBRARY. VOLUMES ALREADY PUBLISHED. SHERIDAN'S PLAYS. PLAYS FROM MOLIÈRE. By English Dramatists. RABELAIS GARGANTUA and the HEROIC DEFOE'S JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR. "PATRIARCHA.” SCOTT'S DEMONOLOGY and WITCHCRAFT. BUTLER'S ANALOGY OF religion. HERRICK'S HESPERIdes. COLERIDGE'S TABLE-TALK. BOCCACCIO'S DECAMERON, STERNE'S TRISTRAM SHANDY, CHAPMAN'S HOMER'S ILIAD. MEDIEVAL TALES. VOLTAIRE'S CANDIDE & JOHNSONS PLAYS and POEMS by BEN JONSON. DANTE'S DIVINE COMEDY. LONGFELLOW's TRANSLATION. GOLDSMITH'S VICAR of WAKEFIELD, PLAYS FABLES and PROVERBS from the SANSKRIT. CHARLES LAMB'S ESSAYS OF ELIA, THE HISTORY OF THomas ellWOOD. "Marvels of clear type and general neatness." Daily Telegraph. B HARVARD LIBRARY INTRODUCTION. In the year 70 B.C., nearly two thousand years ago, Virgil, chief artist among Roman poets, was born in the village of Andes, perhaps that which is now called Pictole, two or three miles south-east of Mantua, where his father had a small estate. He was not Roman bern, but when he was twenty-one years old, the rights of citizenship were ex tended to men of the region that included Mantua. His full name was Publius Vergilius Maio. Vergilius is now written with an c," because modern textual criticism, having observed that it is so given by three important manuscripts, in the line where the poet names himself at the end of the "Georgics" Illo Vergilium me tempore dulcis alebat 46 infers that this must be the older form. For the present, therefore, Virgil has been deprived of an "i" by the classical scholars; but the world at large holds by the old form of a name that has been a house. hold word during the whole life of modern literature. After education in Cremona and Milan, Virgil continued his studies at Naples, and probably at Rome also; learning Greek under Parthenius, a native of Bithynia, and philosophy under Syron, an Epicurean. He was twenty-eight years old when Antony and young Octavius met Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, and the wounds of Caesar were avenged. Rewards of land had been promised to the victorious soldiers, and the home of Virgil was within one of the regions in which men were turned out of their holdings and compelled to yield them to the followers of Antony and Octavius. Octavius, Cæsar's grandnephew and heir, then twenty-one years old, had yet to triumph over Antony before he could be master of the Roman world; and this was not until after another eleven years, by the defeat at sea of Antony and Cleopatra in the fight off Actium. Octavius could then take to himself all chief offices in the Republic. At last, in the year B.C. 27, he was able to put the Republic aside altogether, and at the age of thirty-six establish himself as Augustus Cæsar, the first Emperor of Ron.c. Virgil first became known to Octavius when he went to Rome as an applicant for the restoration of his farm at Andes, in or soon after the year B.C. 42. The soldier, Clodius, who had been put into posses. sion, did not restore the land until there had been a second appeal made by the poet. Virgil's first Eclogue expresses content at its recovery, although it was all covered with stones, and full of pools and rushes. Mantua lies islanded on the Mincio, with swamps beyond. The region is unhealthy, and Virgil's health was not robust. This Eclogue confuses the imagined incident of a slave going to Rome to get his freedom with that of Virgil's own going to Rome to recover his farm. As Dryden translates, Tityrus (who is Virgil) refers thus to his visit to Rome: "There first the youth of heavenly birth I viewed, My grounds to be restored, my former flocks to feed." Beginning his Eclogues thus at the age of about twenty-seven, the poet continned them for six or seven years with a relined grace in imita tion of Greek pastoral poets, which is yet so close an imitation that not only does Vigil brow from them the names of shepherds and shepherdesses; but rocks, caves, and trees, foreign to the region about his own farm, are Sicilian. Within this time, he came to know Quintus Horatius Flaccus-Horace, a poet five years younger than himself. Horace, the son of a liberal-minded "coactor," or collector of payments made for sales at auction, had been educated at Rome and Athens. He had joined, in the ardour of youth, the army of Brutus, as a military tribune, and had been a fugitive from the field of Philippi. Virgil had found also a friend of noble ancestry, in Caius Cilnius Maecenas, a friend of the poet's who was also in close and confidential relations with the young Octavius, and assisted him in the most delicate negotiations. Virgil may have found his way first to Octavius, with the suit for his farm, by applying, as poet, to Mecenas, who drew closer to him as he became more fully acquainted with his genius, after the completion of his Eclogues. Virgil it was who helped Horace to fortune by making him known to Maecenas. It was Macenas who suggested to Virgil the writing of his Georgics. As the Eclogues were based on Theocritus, so Virgil based his Georgics, perhaps in part on the last Georgics of Nicander, certainly in part on the Prognostics of Aratus, and on the Works and Days of Hesiod, with their good lesson of the work men live to do. There is influence also upon Virgil of the philosophic poem of Lucretius, who is said to have died on the day when Vigil at the age of sixteen assumed the "toga virilis," manly dress. It is to inspiration drawn from the poem of Lucretius on the Nature of Things, and to Lucretius himself, that Virgil refers in a famous passage of the second Georgic, which has been thus translated by Dryden : "Ye sacred Mures, with whose beauty fired. What shakes the solid earth, what cause delays Happy the man who, studying Nature's laws, Fearless of fortune, and resigned to fate." Virgil's interest in Lucretius was the greater because he himself was student of medicine, agriculture, mathematics, as well as of poetry, Made rich in worldly goods by the fiendship of Augustus and Maecenas, he was liberal of his own; in all thing, kindly; tall, sunbrowned, and with a quiet rustic air. Virgil was at work upon the “Eneid” when he was about forty years old. When he was forty-seven, in the year B.C. 23, the young Marcellus died, son of Octavia, the sister of Augustus. Virg introduced into the sixth book of the ".Encid" a lament for his death, and celebration of his virtues. A passage in the seventh book appears to refer to an event that occurred three years later, B.C. 20, but Virgil left the twelve books of his "Encid” complete, and died B.c. 19, at the age of fifty-one. His "Encid" was com: lete; but he is said to have asked for its destruction because he died before it had received his finishing touches. His body was removed to Naples-soft Parthenope-his favourite dwelling-place, and buried by the Via l'uteolana, a mile or two outside the town. Virgil aimed always at the utmost finish in his work, and is said to have been disappointed by death of three years' Labour in the perfecting of his "Eneid" which, during many centuries after his death, has received almost divine honour as a perfect epic. The "Eneid," based on Homer's "Iliad," is great in action, since it represents the mythical story of the founding of the Roman power; great in its consequences, the future of the Roman world; and as great as Virgil knew how to make it in its persons. The poet's bias is Latin throughout. He upholds the honour of the Trojans as firmly as he supposed Homer to have maintained that of the Greeks. At Carthage, with Dido, he has in mind the future relations between Carthage and Rome; and the escape of Eneas from inactive pleasure, would suggest to the Court of Augustus how Marc Antony lost all through slavery to his delight in Cleopatra. A wide world of intervening thought separates Virgil from Homer. Virgil's women have their characters often developed with an emphasis caught, in part, from the Greek dramatists. In Homer there is an art wholly creative, shaped out of the rising energies of Greece. In Virgil there is an art chiefly imitative, refined by a master poet after Rome had touched the highest point of all her greatness. |