ts meaning and pathos to the story of AEneas and Dido.
Attractive as it undoubtedly is, the story of Dido is in the minds of
nine modern readers out of ten fatal to the effect of the AEneid as a
whole. The very beauty of the tale is partly the cause of this. To the
schoolboy and to thousands who are schoolboys no longer the poem is
nothing more than the love story of the Trojan leader and the Tyrian
queen. Its human interest ends with the funeral fires of Dido, and the
books which follow are read merely as ingenious displays of the
philosophic learning, the antiquarian research, and the patriotism of
Vergil. But the story is yet more directly fatal in the way in which it
cuts off the hero himself from modern sympathies. His desertion of Dido
makes, it has been said, "an irredeemable poltroon of him in all honest
English eyes." Dryden can only save his character by a jest, and
Rousseau damns it with an epigram. Mr. Keble supposes that in the
interview among the Shades the poet himself intended the abasement of
his hero, and Mr. Gladstone has capped this by a theory that Vergil
meant to draw his readers' admiration, not to AEneas but to Turnus.

It is wiser perhaps to turn from the impressions of Vergil's critics to
the impression which the story must have left in the mind of Vergil
himself. It is surely needless to assume that the first of poetic
artists has forgotten the very rudiments of his art in placing at the
opening of his song a figure which strips all interest from his hero.
Nor is it needful to believe that such a blunder has been unconscious,
and that Vergil has had to learn the true effect of his episode on the
general texture of his poem from the reader of to-day. The poet who
paints for us the character of Dido must have felt, ere he could have
painted it, that charm which has ever since bewitched the world. Every
nerve in Vergil must have thrilled at the consummate beauty of this
woman of his own creation, her self-abandonment, her love, her
suffering, her despair. If he deliberately uses her simply as a foil to
the character of AEneas it is with a perception of this charm infinitely
deeper and tenderer than ours. But he does use her as a foil. Impulse,
passion, the mighty energies of unbridled will are wrought up into a
figure of unequalled beauty, and then set against the true manhood of
the founder and type of Rome, the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of
self-control.

To the stoicism of Vergil, st