his youth, and feel that here" nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade." The poet does all he can to secure variety, as I hope to show, to make this city or that, with its surrounding region, stand out clearly in the picture, and take the right colouring for the delectation of its descendants. Then how splendid and martial is the tone throughout, how perfect the consummation in the figures of Turnus and Camilla, the hero and heroine of these last books! It is with the perfection of his artistic resources that Virgil solves his greatest difficulty.

At this point I will turn for a moment to the parallel episode in the poem of Silius Italicus. Silius was not a great poet, but one might fancy that he had a good opportunity in the gathering of Italian contingents to repel Hannibal. Unluckily there were too many of them, and the conscientious verse-maker, modelling his work on Homer's catalogue rather than on Virgil's pageant, overdoes his detail, bewilders and wearies his reader, without arousing any keen sense of national exultation.1 His flashlight is a feeble one; the endless procession passes, and we grow stupid and weary. We cannot see the wood for the trees: towns, rivers, mountains, gods and temples, soldiers and their armour, pass before us without making us the least enthusiastic, and I think that even the Italian of the early empire could hardly have been moved to emotion. Almost the only bit of

1 Boissier remarked on the same fault in Flaubert's Salammbo (of the Carthaginian contingents): Nouvelles Promenades Archéologiques,” p. 321.

genuine poetry I can find is the allusion to Cicero when Arpinum is reached:

"ille super Gangen, super exauditus et Indos,
implebit terras voce, et furialia bella

fulmine compescet linguae, nec deinde relinquet
par decus eloquio cuiquam sperare nepotum."1

And after all this is but a momentary reminiscence of the prophetic end of the sixth Aeneid.

Milton, in the first book of Paradise Lost, follows the Virgilian, not the Homeric, method. The heathen gods and devils whom he marshals against the hosts of Jehovah are carefully chosen, limited in number, marked by characteristics familiar to his Puritan readers, and poetically distinct and attractive, e.g.:

Thammuz came next behind,
Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate
In amorous ditties all a summer's day,
While smooth Adonis from his native rock
Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood
Of Thammuz yearly wounded.

It is most interesting to notice that Milton had much the same difficulty to face as Virgil, and that he dealt with it victoriously in the very same way. He had to engage the interest, nay, the emotion, of his reader, in these gods and devils, as Virgil had to enlist the admiration of the Roman reader for the

1 Punica, vii. 410 ff.

2 Paradise Lost, book i., 446 ff.

wrong side in the strife. Each poet achieves his object in his own way, but the method is in the main the same: the secret is in the skilful selection of detail, and in the high dignity and poetic beauty of the language used.

In one respect Milton surpassed his model. Virgil ended his pageant most happily with the resplendent figures of Turnus and Camilla; Milton closes his very quietly among classical allusions, then pauses for a moment to begin again. His own imagination has been kindled, and he has kindled ours, by the pictures of these magnificent fiends, Moloch, Chemosh, Dagon, and the rest, and he cannot halt as yet. With the words, "All these and more came flocking," he braces himself for a new effort, and launches into the full diapason of overwhelming organ sound. We fairly forget that these are the hosts of the Devil fighting against the will of God, as we almost forget, at the close of the seventh Aeneid, that Rome and Aeneas were in the hands of Fate for the good of mankind. But I will return to this subject for a moment when we have finished our task.

Before I end this introductory note, I wish to draw attention to an observation made by Dr. Henry in his "Aeneidea," when about to deal with Virgil's pageant.1 I have the greatest reverence for Dr. Henry as a critic, for he is always interesting and instructive even where, as in this case (so it seems to me) he is manifestly in the wrong; and I have followed his comments carefully, as will be seen through1 "Aeneidea," vol. ii., p. 591 ff.

not

out the following pages. "Nowhere," he says, even in the visit to Hades, is the aristocratic spirit of Virgil manifested more plainly than in this account of the Latin armament." He sees the aristocratic spirit of Virgil thus strongly manifested, in contrast to Homer's true spirit of a democrat "; for the Italian gives us successive pictures of the leaders of the tribes, hardly mentioning the rank and file at all, while in Homer the people are described first, and their leaders follow. But what is the general tenor of the Iliad? Surely not democratic; it is a story of the deeds of the chiefs and their protecting deities while the people look on or fight unnoticed. If the rank and file come first in Homer, I think it is chiefly because the main object of the list is to glorify the individual Greek cities and their wealth and resources, not to uphold the democratic principle; and if the chiefs come first in Virgil, I think it is because he knew very well what treatment would give his art its best chance. The result is, in Dr. Henry's own words (p. 593), with which I cordially agree, that "while Virgil enriches the Aeneid with a chapter second in interest and poetical beauty to none in the whole work, Homer encumbers the Iliad with, to say the best of it, a long dry table of statistical details." I think Dr. Henry was led to his views about our poet's anti-democratic mental attitude by the curious omission of a subject to "gerunt" in line 664. After telling us about the prince or leader Aventinus, Virgil goes on abruptly: "pila manu saevosque gerunt in bella dolones,"

which Dr. Henry explains as an open expression of contempt for the crowd. With all my admiration for Dr. Henry, I am convinced that he is quite wrong here. There are a good many signs in book vii. of unfinished workmanship, though the highly finished parts are as fine as any in the whole poem; and I think this may very well reckon as one of these signs, unless indeed, as I shall presently suggest, these lines are not in their proper place. At any rate I cannot persuade myself that Virgil left out the subject to "gerunt " in order to pour contempt on the Italian rank and file. It is curious to find Dr. Henry going far to refute his own argument by remarking that Milton, though democrat and regicide, follows Virgil's method and not Homer's. If Milton did so, and made" the promiscuous crowd" stand all aloof, we may be sure that he did so for artistic reasons, not for political ones. He had no use for the promiscuous crowd, except, when his list of the chiefs is ended, to send up, at sight of the unfurling of the imperial ensign of hell,

'A shout that tore Heaven's concave, and beyond,
Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night,'

and thus to introduce a passage of such sublime splendour as is hardly to be found either in Homer or Virgil. The old Puritan was a consummate artist and knew very well where his artistic interest lay; this was his compass all through his long voyage, and beyond all doubt it was Virgil's too.