a
story that is only of feigned and foreign interest. Doubtless it was the
"AEneid," his artificial and unfinished epic, that won Virgil the favour
of the Middle Aces. To the Middle Ages, which knew not Greek, and knew
not Homer, Virgil was the representative of the heroic and eternally
interesting past. But to us who know Homer, Virgil's epic is indeed,
"like moonlight unto sunlight;" is a beautiful empty world, where no real
life stirs, a world that shines with a silver lustre not its own, but
borrowed from "the sun of Greece."

Homer sang of what he knew, of spears and ships, of heroic chiefs and
beggar men, of hunts and sieges, of mountains where the lion roamed, and
of fairy isles where a goddess walked alone. He lived on the marches of
the land of fable, when half the Mediterranean was a sea unsailed, when
even Italy was as dimly descried as the City of the Sun in Elizabeth's
reign. Of all that he knew he sang, but Virgil could only follow and
imitate, with a pale antiquarian interest, the things that were alive for
Homer. What could Virgil care for a tussle between two stout
men-at-arms, for the clash of contending war-chariots, driven each on
each, like wave against wave in the sea? All that tide had passed over,
all the story of the "AEneid" is mere borrowed antiquity, like the Middle
Ages of Sir Walter Scott; but the borrower had none of Scott's joy in the
noise and motion of war, none of the Homeric "delight in battle."

Virgil, in writing the "AEneid," executed an imperial commission, and an
ungrateful commission; it is the sublime of hack-work, and the legend may
be true which declares that, on his death-bed, he wished his poem burned.
He could only be himself here and there, as in that earliest picture of
romantic love, as some have called the story of "Dido," not remembering,
perhaps, that even here Virgil had before his mind a Greek model, that he
was thinking of Apollonius Rhodius, and of Jason and Medea. He could be
himself, too, in passages of reflection and description, as in the
beautiful sixth book, with its picture of the under world, and its hints
of mystical philosophy.

Could we choose our own heavens, there in that Elysian world might Virgil
be well content to dwell, in the shadow of that fragrant laurel grove,
with them who were "priests pure of life, while life was theirs, and holy
singers, whose songs were worthy of Apollo." There he might muse on his
own religion and on the Divi