people praised him with St. Paul. His form was sculptured in cathedrals among Old Testament saints, and his verses have been found in the catacombs with the cross and monogram of our Lord. And what could show his power in the Middle Ages more than the fact that Dante represents him as his teacher and his guide through hell? But just in proportion as he was reverenced as a saint and honoured as a sage would be his influence in perpetuating and spreading such ideas and beliefs as, we have already seen, stood directly in the way of the people's free enjoyment of natural scenery, and which it was Lucretius' great endeavour to destroy. For, believe who will that Virgil regarded "Nature as a coherent body of universal law," no one at an advanced stage of civilization was ever more wholly and sincerely superstitious, or had actually less of a consistent belief in the uniformity of nature's order. He believed apparently in laws and eternal covenants laid down by nature for the growth of certain plants and trees in certain soils; and yet to him the sun had forebodings of swelling treachery and hidden wars, and the sea, as well as dogs and birds, and the entrails of beasts, would give signs of coming ills, and Aetna, belching forth her flames, might tell of approaching doom. "6 Germany heard a clashing of arms in the whole heavens: with unwonted heavings quaked the Alps. Oft too a voice was distinctly heard through the silent groves, a voice of mighty tones, and phantoms ghastly in marvellous mode appeared in the dusk of twilight and cattle spoke (a monstrous portent), rivers stay their course, the earth opens its mouth, ivory weeps as in sorrow within the shrines, statues of bronze sweat. Eridanus, monarch of waters, whirl

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ing forests in his mad eddy, poured forth his flood, and over all the plains bore herds and stalls alike. Nor at the same time did fibres of threatening import ever cease to appear in the entrails that boded ill, or jets of blood to flow from wells, and high cities to resound the night long with the howling of wolves. At no other time did more lightnings shoot through a cloudless sky; nor ever so oft did ill-boding comets blaze. Therefore it came to pass that a second time Philippi saw Roman lines engage in civil fight; and the heavenly powers thought it would not be unmeet that twice with Roman blood Emathia and the broad plain of Haemus should be fattened" (Georgic i. 474-492).

And not only might nature be thus arbitrarily and horribly prophetic, but trees when pulled at might bleed and groan and prophesy; and harpies, half maiden, half bird, might in their loathsomeness descend to their feast on the shore; and monsters like the cyclops, or the half-brutish Cacus, might haunt the caves and the mountains; and bees might be produced de novo by a process of fermentation from a bullock of a certain age killed in a certain way; and men might spring from trees (Aeneid viii. 315); and ships might be changed into nymphs (id. x. 220-224); and fauns and gods and goddesses of course might haunt the woods, to the exclusion, in ordinary circumstances, of those who knew it, and to the danger of those who did not. "Even then the awful sanctity of the spot used to scare the frightened rustics, even then they shuddered at the grove and cliff. 'This wood,' he says, 'this hill with leafy crown, is haunted by a god: what god it is is doubtful; the Arcadians believe they have beheld Jove himself, while many a time his right hand shook the

darkling aegis and stirred the thunderclouds" (Aeneid

viii. 349-354).

"Jam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestes

Dira loci; jam tum silvam saxumque tremebant."

Just so. And how, when in mortal fear of the gods, could the rustics be supposed to go for pleasure where they might at any time meet them? And how could Virgil's poems, read and reverenced as they were for centuries, have other than a retarding influence on the love of men for wood and hill and shore, when they spoke of these as haunted by man-eating monsters, or by supernatural beings still more to be feared by men?) Homer, so far as known, would have a similar influence, and so would all classical poets in which such tales are told, and so all nursery rhymes and stories of giants and vampires and demons and witches and ghosts and so forth. And it is only now, when we have got rid of belief in such things and of robbers and beasts of prey, and have attained to a feeling of security anywhere, that people in general are left free to rejoice in the hills and the lonely shore, and in the exploration of caves and mountain wilds and wilderness and solitudes unknown. It is not because we have better eyes than men in olden times, or can see what they could not see, that we are drawn to jagged peaks and wilds from which they shrank, but because we have "walked forth into the light of things" and have entered into a heritage of freedom, of which Lucretius, with all his love of intellectual liberty, could not even have dreamed.

But if in some things Virgil is farther away from us than Lucretius, in others he is much nearer us-very near and very modern in sentiment and sympathy. Virgil's is peculiarly the poetry of pathos. Like

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Longfellow he broods pathetically on the days gone by, and listens in tears for the voices of the past. "We have been Trojans; Ilium was" (Aeneid ii. 325). Such was the mournful message of Pantheus to Aeneas when Troy was in flames; and a sigh for vanished glory runs through all the Aeneid. "An ancient city is falling." "With tears I leave my native shores and the harbour and the plains where Troy was. I am borne an exile into the deep with my comrades and son and penates and great gods" (Aeneid iii. 10-12). The days of old-old trees, old men, old shores, old lands, old customs, old arms-and all things with old associations are dwelt on with frequency and pathos. The cypress and the bay-tree were entwined in olden times, like the rowan tree with ourselves, "wi' mony ties o' hame and infancy" (Aeneid ii. 714-715; vii. 59-60). And "the old arm-chair" and old homes are not without their prototypes. "With this golden bowl Anchises used to pour libations at the altars; these did Priam wear when he summoned his people in due form to give them laws, even this sceptre and holy tiara and these robes, the workmanship of the daughters of Ilium" (id. vii. 245-248). And with such remembrances of the past there is of course combined thorough sympathy, great tenderness for the weak and helpless and forlorn-for all in misfortune. When Aeneas saw Priam, once the proud ruler of Asia with so many peoples and lands, lying on the shore "a huge trunk, and a head torn from the shoulders, and a body without a name," the image of his father, the king's equal in age, came to view, and Creusa forsaken, and his house destroyed, and what might have happened to his little Iulus (ii. 554-563). And more pathetic still is the plea of the youth Euryalus as he ventured

forth into the night with Nisus on a dangerous message, and, as it happened, to death. One boon above all he craved, that, in case of accident to himself, they would comfort and relieve his helpless mother. With such a promise he could face more boldly every risk, and having got the promise from Iulus that his mother would be his (Iulus') in all but the name, he sallied forth with Nisus to glory and to death. And the false and perjured Sinon too could speak pathetically of his having no hope of seeing again his old fatherland, or sweet children, or parent whom he longed to see, and Sinon himself was saved by the Trojans in pity for his misfortunes. And so was Achemenides, the wan and rugged fugitive from Polyphemus; and his case shows all the more strongly the poet's sense of the claims of misfortune on the sympathies of men, for, after Sinon, the Trojan wanderers might have suspected treachery, or put Achemenides to death, out of sheer revenge on the Greeks. But the whole of the Aeneid may be said to be a plea for the unfortunate Trojans, and a representation of the idea that the vanquished, by their very discomforture and misfortunes, may pass to final victory and greater glory. It is "the epic of failure-of failure that is pregnant with triumph, of the victory of the vanquished." Of Aeneas, as of Abraham, it was said in prophecy, "Go forth into a land that I will show thee, and I will make of thee a great nation," and through sorrow and through gloom he passed to triumph and to song in the rise of a mightier empire than he ever could have dreamed of or gained in Troy. Driven from Troy he founded Rome by the will of heaven.

In purity, in gentleness, in tenderness of sympathy with the suffering and unfortunate, and in susceptibility