In the city and not in the country the " Eclogues were probably written. Blessings brighten as they take their flight, and most poetry in praise of country life is written in the town. Shut out from his home, a thousand sweet illusions gather about the memory of it. The poet feels the tender grace of a day that is dead. Tityrus, who had worked the farm on shares and had enabled Virgil of old time to play the gentleman farmer while he gave his thoughts to poetry, is now exalted into an Arcadian shepherd. The tending of flocks is the only real work of life; love-making and contests of verse and song are its solaces and delights.

That such a poem could have been published in the year 37 before Christ, in the midst of the second great civil war, shows not only the idealizing powers of the true poet, but also the large fruitage of Virgil's previous years of calm. There is a naïveté and a liquid flow to the "Eclogues" which witness to the rise of a new force in literature. Pollio is said to have pressed the poet to the writing of them, and Theocritus is said to have furnished the model and the inspiration. But no one who has in imagination reclined with the writer sub tegmine fagi can ever banish from his mind the delightful freshness of the verse, the charm of the Italian landscape which pervades it, and the impression of Vir gil's wonderful love for nature. Nature seems actually to live and speak. She mourns for the dead Cæsar, as in Greek poetry she mourned for the dead Daphnis. "In the last Eclogue," as another has said, "all the gods of Arcady come to console the poet when his faithless lady has forsaken him to follow his rival to the wars. This passage suggested the august procession of

the superhuman mourners of Lycidas, which in its turn suggested to Shelley the splendid fragment of Adonais."

In the "Georgics," published in 30 or 29 B. C., after the great victory of Actium had made Augustus sole ruler of the Roman world, we have a more sober and lofty poem, whose temper of chastened hope and serene endeavor, to use the phrase of Prof. Sellar, befits the time of settlement. The word "Georgics" might be translated "Field-work." It is a glorification of industry. The country is not now the scene of perpetual holiday, as it was in the "Eclogues." Work is to be done, and the four sorts of work give their themes to the four books, which successively treat of tillage, trees, herds, and bees. Here too, Virgil had his model, and the model was Hesiod's "Works and Days." He had his prompter also; for Mæcenas, the generous patron and encourager of timid genius, urged the writing of them.

There was reason enough for the advice. The long wars had been times when regular government was almost suspended. Rapine and corruption had stalked in the track of the advancing armies. There was danger that the old virtues of the republic would be buried in the republic's grave. What could arrest the decay of Roman life? Nothing but a revival of the principles which at the first had made Rome great. Industry, frugality, simplicity, love of home, and reverence for law-these must take the place of strife and luxury, of ambition and greed. With a true poet's insight and with a true patriot's hope, Virgil seems to have risen to the occasion. He clothes with a halo of imagination and invests with a tender beauty all the homeliest details of country labor and country life. The "Georgics"

would be the greatest of didactic poems if they were meant to be a didactic poem at all. But this is a mistaken notion; they were never intended to answer for a book of instruction to the farmer. Their object rather was to elevate men's conceptions of the arts of peace, to dignify humble toil, to teach the love of country, to inspire reverence for nature's laws.

These poems give us, more plainly than any others, Virgil's ideas about nature and about government. Nature to him means universal law. The same authority which in the "Eneid" appears as Fate, appears in the "Georgics" as Nature. "Thus Nature," he says, “at first imposed these laws, these eternal ordinances, when Deucalion first cast stones in an empty world, whence the hard race of men arose." But Nature, to Virgil's mind, does not exclude intelligence, or prevent the care and purpose of the gods. Hear him once again: "Incessant labor conquers all things"; "for gods there are"; "Jove hurls the lightning"; "therefore venerate the gods"; "may they now save the Saviour of the State!"

And so Virgil's doctrine of divine government leads to his doctrine of human government. That too has divine sanctions. Augustus, who had pacified the world and saved the State, was the very embodiment at once of the will of the gods and of eternal law. It is not necessary to regard Virgil as a mere court poet, who flatters Augustus as a matter of trade. Nor was the deification of the emperor a piece of sycophancy. Perverse and idolatrous though it was, it was still in large part, as I shall hope to show, the blind exaggeration of a noble sentiment-the sentiment of loyalty and of

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reverence for divinely appointed powers. As the Hebrews of old called human judges "gods," because they were appointed by God to stand in his place and administer justice in his name, so the apotheosis of the Cæsars and Virgil's declaration that Augustus would be exalted to heaven, as a new star filling the gap between the Virgin and the Scales, were in some degree a poetical recognition of the fact that the powers that be are ordained of God, and that his faithful representatives shall partake of God's own immortality.

There is a promise in the "Georgics" which indicates the consciousness in Virgil's mind that the time was near when he could venture upon a larger task than any he had yet achieved. He declares that he will yet wed Cæsar's glories to an epic strain. The "Eneid" is the fulfillment of that promise. Ten years of work he spent upon it. In the "Eclogues" he had followed in the track of Theocritus; in the "Georgics" he had imitated Hesiod; now in his last great poem he mounts higher, and aspires to produce a work like those of Homer.

The "Æneid" indeed is intended to be an "Odyssey" and an "Iliad" in one, the first six books with the wanderings of Æneas aiming to be an "Odyssey," and the last six books, with their battles on land, aiming to be an "Iliad." The hero, however, as befits the unity of the epic, is in both halves of the story the same, the pious Æneas; and the great object of the poem is to show how the universal empire of Rome, which the gods had willed and Fate had decreed, was first established on the Italian shores. Virgil will write a poem that reflects the genius and the destiny of the Latin race; he will dignify the history of Rome by linking it to the heroes

F

of antiquity and the counsels of heaven; he will clothe his theme with all the splendors of legend and song; he will reproduce the Homeric poems in Italy; he will himself be the Homer of Rome.

How fully this magnificent project was realized we have now to inquire. There seems every reason to believe that, till within a few hours of his death, he was hopeful of accomplishing his task. In the year 19 B. C., he read to Augustus and to Octavia, the sister of Augustus, the second book of the poem with its account of the destruction of Troy, the fourth book with its tragic story of Dido, and the sixth book with its description of Æneas's descent into the underworld. It is said that when Octavia heard the splendid eulogy upon her son, the dead Marcellus, the mother's heart within her gave way; she fainted both for grief and joy; and she revived to make the poet glad with a great gift of gold.

But the "Æneid" was not yet ready to leave the author's hands. The whole poem lacked revision; in the latter part especially there were lines still incomplete; Virgil counted three more years as necessary to finish his work. He set out for Athens, in order on the voyage to get the local color needed for his description of the wanderings of Æneas. At the capital of Greece he met Augustus. The emperor persuaded Virgil to return with him to Italy. The burning sun of Megara made him ill. He continued his voyage notwithstanding. At Brundisium he died, and he was buried at Naples.

Neither CatulVirgil, when he

All the great Latin poets died young. lus nor Lucretius reached middle age. died, had just passed it, for he was fifty-one.

He died