riotic effort
of Turnus and the people of Ausonia to expel the invaders from the Italian
shores. Though Virgil did not intend it, he has twice transferred the
reader's sympathy from the hero of his story: once by his inimitable
description of the mourning and death of Dido from the departure and
perfidy of AEneas, and again, from the burst of patriotic feeling which he
has represented as animating the Etruscan tribes at the violent intrusion
of the Trojan invaders.

Virgil's heroes will bear no sort of comparison with those either of the
_Iliad_ or the _Jerusalem Delivered_. AEneas himself is a vain conceited
man, proud of his piety and his wanderings, and destroying our admiration
for either by the ostentation with which he brings them forward on all
occasions. The well-known line,

"Sum pius AEneas, fama super aethere notus,"

occurs too frequently to render it possible to take any interest in such a
self-applauding character. Compare this with the patriotic devotion, the
heroic courage, the domestic tenderness, the oblivion of self in Hector,
in the _Iliad_, and it will at once appear how far deeper the insight into
the human heart was in the Grecian than the Roman poet. One striking
instance will at once illustrate this. When Hector parts from Andromache
at the Scaean Gate, and after he has taken his infant son from his arms, he
prays to Jupiter that he may become so celebrated that the people in
seeing himself pass, may say only--"He far exceeds his father." What
sentiment on the part of a hero himself, and at the moment the bulwark
and sole stay of Troy! But what does Virgil make AEneas say in similar
circumstances?--"Learn, boy, virtue and true labour from ME, fortune from
others."

What a difference between the thought in the two poets, and the interest
which their words excite in the breast of the reader!

What an historical gallery, or rather what a gallery of imaginary
portraits, does the _Iliad_ contain! It is the embodying so many separate
and well-distinguished characters, in different persons, which forms the
grand characteristic--the unequalled supremacy of the poem. Only think of
what they are. Achilles, vehement alike in anger and in grief, wrathful,
impetuous, overbearing, "the most terrible character ever conceived by
man;" yet not insensible at times to the tender emotions, loving his
country, weeping for his father, devoted to his home, but yet determined
to purchase deathless renown by a sh