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real vocation, he regrets that he did not fulfill his early Vow. Even to the end of his days his love for philosophy never leaves him, and both Plato and Epicurus seem to speak again in portions of his verse.

To poetry

But to Virgil, dulces ante omnia Musa. he early consecrates himself. He has the sense of a mission. He sets himself as deliberately to become a poet as Cicero sets himself to become an orator. The labor of years seems short, for the love he has to the Muse. Seven years he gives to the composition of his first poem; seven years to the second; ten years to the third; and then he wishes to destroy this third, because, forsooth, his life is too short to furnish the three additional years needed to complete it. So, revolving long his several themes and working them over and over before he gives them to the public eye, he at last produces works of such incomparable artistic excellence that the world will not willingly let them die-indeed, they seem endowed with an inherent immortality.

If other things are equal, poetry lives in proportion to the perfection of its artistic form. As the productions of the poet are borne downward on the stream of time, those which have angularities of structure are caught and stopped upon their way-only the rounded and innately beautiful pass by all obstacles and sail on to the ocean of eternal fame. And Virgil was pre-eminently the artist. He, perhaps, more fully than any other of the sons of men, had the literary instinct, the discernment of form. Not so much a creator as a shaper of material, he regarded thought as a means of producing literary effects.

He was a rhetorical poet, if the phrase be permissi

ble. But as the true rhetorician knows how to choose great themes, because only great themes will bear the richest garb, so Virgil never wastes his gifts on empty words. Beginning with lighter subjects, probably because he seems to himself more equal to them, he gives the maturity of his powers to the greatest subject possible to his time, he celebrates the rise of Rome's litical dominion; and, by linking her present grandeur to the heroic past, he blends patriotism and piety together. And "the silent spells held in those haunted syllables" have done more than any other single influence to give a humane and gracious aspect to the hardness and sordidness of Roman life. Latin before the Christian era would seem the language of a heartless race, and Rome would seem only incarnate power and law, if it were not for the sweetness and pathos of Virgil.

In this matter of artistic form Virgil was an originator. He carried the music of words to a higher perfection than it had ever reached before. Other Latin poets had preceded him, but in their hands the strength of the language had hardly been tamed-it was sonorous, but it was harsh; it had majesty, but it lacked melody. Ennius, the Calabrian, was a half-Greek, and he aimed to reproduce in Latin the Homeric hexameters; but Ennius, though he had a lofty genius, was deficient in art, and it was left to Virgil to make that verse "the noblest metre ever molded by the lips of man." Ennius died just a century before Virgil was born. was the father of Latin poetry. His "Annals," a curious mixture of history and song, unquestionably furnished Virgil not only with his metre, but with the

He

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theme of his great epic-the origin, greatness, and destiny of Rome. Whole lines from Ennius, indeed, are said to remain embedded in the "Eneid," and to give archaic simplicity and force to portions of Virgil's poem. Lucretius was born 100 B. C., while Virgil was born in 70. Catullus preceded Virgil only fifteen years. Both Lucretius and Catullus were in the zenith of their fame during the years when Virgil was getting his training. He was profoundly influenced by both of them. Lucretius was the most original and profound thinker of the Roman race. His doctrines of the uniformity of nature and the reign of law became a part of Virgil's system of thought, while Virgil, unlike Lucretius, continued to believe in a will of the gods which expressed itself in nature and molded the wills of men. Lucretius, moreover, Virgil caught an impassioned earnestness, a condensation and vividness of expression, which constitute one of the most marked characteristics of his verse.

From

Catullus furnished Virgil with an example of sweet sadness and graceful melancholy; but the later poet improves upon the tender cadences and the pathetic simplicity of his predecessor, by adding to them dignified refinement and just bounds. To put it all in a word, Virgil has absorbed in himself and has combined into one all the great merits of the Roman poets that preceded him.

If Virgil had contented himself with drinking in and reproducing the general characteristics of the earlier poets, no fault could ever have been found with him. If, like Milton, he had recalled without copying, he would have had only praise. But Virgil is the greatest

of imitators. Whatever suits his purpose, whether in Greek or Latin verse, he appropriates without a qualm of conscience, and with an air of happy self-compla cency. True it is that whatever he touches he adorns. When he was charged with using Homer's similes as if they were his own, he merely replied: "Only the strong can wield the club of Hercules." He has made others' work his own so perfectly that what is original with him can hardly be distinguished from what he has appropriated. So Molière said boldly: "I take my property wherever I find it." Even in Shakespeare we have a somewhat similar phenomenon. Plot and incident, thought and phrase, our greatest poet often borrows with perfect unconcern. His early dramas are apparently only others' tragedies made over, but made over so wonderfully that even their original authors had more reason for admiration than for complaint.

Virgil is no plagiarist in the ordinary sense. As Dr. Wilkinson has well said, he looked upon Homer and the elder poets, both of Greece and Rome, as a great treasure-house, like that of nature itself. He does not seek to conceal his indebtedness-he rather desires it to be recognized. Like the Spartans, he would have us admire the art with which he steals. Just as Charles Sumner sometimes introduced into his speeches imitations of noble passages from Demosthenes, and was only delighted when you noticed and praised them as a proof of his scholarship and taste, so Virgil would only have felt complimented if you had pointed out how ingeniously he had made his own poems an anthology of all the poets that had gone before him. An echo, says Miss Wedgewood, may be sweeter than the sound that

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awoke it, and we may be thankful that Virgil has echoed down to our time a thousand voices of the past that would otherwise be lost.

We may say something more about this matter of originality, after we have considered what Virgil actually wrote. As we have already intimated, there was progress in his work, corresponding to the breadth of his experience and the maturity of his powers. As we think of the "Eclogues," the "Georgics," and the "Æneid" succeeding one another, first the graceful pastorals, secondly the didactics of industry, thirdly the great political epic, we are reminded of Tennyson— the linked sweetness and indecisive touch of his youthful poems such as, “Airy, fairy Lilian," the philosophic depth and moral energy of his manlier work in " In Memoriam," and the broad freedom and epic swing of his later "Idylls of the King."

The earliest work of Virgil was naturally the "Eclogues." He had been dispossessed of his country home by Cæsar's veterans. But Pollio, the Roman governor of the district beyond the Po, had introduced him to Augustus, had interceded for him, and had secured a decree of restoration. When he went to take his estate however, he found that de jure ownership was one thing, and de facto ownership was another. The old soldier in possession attacked him with such passion and vigor that Virgil was forced to swim the Mincio to save his life. It is doubtful whether he ever really recovered the farm. Some say that Augustus preferred to permit his legionary to retain what he had so stoutly defended, and that Virgil was compensated in some other way, possibly by the gift of a residence in Naples.