sionless Imperator into greatness.
It was the bidding of Augustus that had called him from his "rustic
measure" to this song of Borne, and the thought of Augustus blended,
whether he would or not, with that Rome of the future which seemed
growing up under his hands. Unlike too as Vergil was to the Emperor,
there was a common undertone of melancholy that drew the two men
together. The wreck of the older faiths, the lingering doubt whether
good was after all the strongest thing in the world, whether "the gods"
were always on the side of justice and right, throws its gloom over the
noblest passages of the AEneid. It is the same doubt, hardened by the
temper of the man into a colder and more mocking scepticism, that sounds
in the "plaudite et valete" of the deathbed of Augustus. The Emperor had
played his part well, but it was a part that he could hardly persuade
himself was real. All that wisdom and power could do had been done, but
Augustus had no faith in the great fabric he had reared. Vergil drew
faith in the fortunes of Rome from his own enthusiasm, but to him too
the moral order of the world brought only the melancholy doubt of
Hamlet. Everywhere we feel "the pity on't." The religious theory of the
universe, the order of the world around him, jars at every step with his
moral faith. AEneas is the reflection of a time out of joint. Everywhere
among good men there was the same moral earnestness, the same stern
resolve after nobleness and grandeur of life, and everywhere there was
the same inability to harmonize this moral life with the experience of
the world.

A noble stoicism breathes in the character of AEneas, the virtue of the
virtuous man, refined and softened by a poet's pitifulness, heightened
above all by the lingering doubt whether there were any necessary
connection between virtue and the divine order of things around it.

"Di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid
Usquam Justitia est et mens sibi conscia recti,
Praemia digna ferant!"

The words glow, so to speak, with moral earnestness, but through them we
feel the doubt whether, after all, uprightness and a good conscience
were really the object of a divine care. Heaven had flown further off
from earth than in the days of the Iliad. The laws of the universe, as
time had revealed them, the current of human affairs, the very might of
the colossal Empire in which the world of civilization found itself
prisoned, all seemed to be dwarfing m