The next letter we shall quote is from Mr. Gladstone:—
“Hawarden, December 17, 1855.
“My dear Panizzi,
I entirely feel, upon a recent deliberate re-perusal, Tasso’s right to stand in the very restricted class of the great epic writers. It is true that in that class he seems to me to stand immediately below Homer, but I should boldly say the same of Virgil.
His own life and fortunes are indeed deeply moving.
Yours, &c., &c.,
W. E. Gladstone.”
With all due deference to so great an authority, and fully agreeing with his estimate of Tasso, the position assigned by Mr. Gladstone to Virgil is scarcely doing justice to the chief of the Latin poets. Panizzi, in a letter to Mr. Gladstone, says:—“I shall be happy, you may be sure, to read what you say on Tasso, who is, no doubt, greatly below Homer, but not so much below Virgil as people affect to say.”
It is true that Virgil laboured under one unfortunate disadvantage; the language in which he wrote is certainly less fitted, in point of simplicity and sublimity, as a vehicle for epic poetry than the Greek.
It will not detract from the miscellaneous character of the information promised in this chapter to subjoin a few extracts from a correspondence which took place between Panizzi and Mr. Thomas Carlyle, who was not one of those who were entirely satisfied with the defective Reading-Room at the British Museum, which preceded the present splendid building, soon to be described. Full of sad experiences of the manifold inconveniences of the former, he pardonably, but erroneously, imagined that it might be possible to obtain some more private and more comfortable spot wherein to pursue his studies at the Museum. In his endeavours to attain this end, however, he was not altogether successful.