it a revival of religious fervency. Though
Virgil and Wordsworth are in many ways as unlike as two poets can be,
they are alike in the possession of that gentle and trustful outlook on
the world of nature which stimulates the mind to think of itself in its
relation to the Power. We do not need to analyse the process or to put
it into any logical shape; we may rest content with it as a fact in the
history of Roman religious experience.

In Virgil's case, as in Wordsworth's, this feeling had the effect of
reconciling the poet's mind to the old forms of religious worship.
Reconcile is, perhaps, hardly the right word; we may doubt whether he
had ever quarrelled with them. As he believed in the Power and its
manifestations, so too he believed in the traditional modes of
propitiating it, not asking himself the _raison d'etre_ of this or that
ceremony, still less looking on them with pity and contempt, like
Lucretius, but accepting them in his broad humanity as part of the life
and thought of man in Italy.

fortunatus et ille Deos qui _novit_ agrestes.[878]

Let us mark the word _novit_. The husbandman has come to recognise these
emanations of the Power and to know them as friends; the word could not
have been used of malignant spirits. As I said in an early lecture, man
advances in his knowledge of the Power as he advances in civilisation.
So the rural rites have a claim on his sympathy no less than the men who
performed them; he knew them in their detail, and he knew them in the
spirit which animated them. He must have studied them in detail, and not
only the rural cults, but those of the city too; every gesture in
worship has an interest for him, and so great is our respect for his
accuracy that we accept what he tells us even if we cannot explain
it.[879] His careful learning in all these details has been the means of
preserving for us large sources of knowledge; for Servius, Macrobius,
and other commentators accumulated stores of it in endeavouring to
interpret him.

Now, this is not mere antiquarianism in Virgil, any more than is the
detail of old life which abounds in Scott's poems and novels. These two
men had the same wide, sympathetic outlook on the world. Scott was
interested in everything and everybody, whether living or dead long ago,
and in all they did; and I think we may say the same of Virgil, though
he is said to have been rather reserved and shy than genial and
talkative like Scott. Virgil's mind was