Quem te inquit reddidissem
Poetarum maxime[104]!
The traditional veneration attaching to his name, among the classes too ignorant to know anything of his works, survived during the middle ages in the fancies which ascribed to him the powers of a magician or beneficent genius, appearing in many forms and at various times and places widely separated from one another.
With the first revival of learning and letters in different countries, the old pre-eminence of Virgil again asserts itself. In England ‘the earliest classical revival’ (to quote again the words of Mr. Green) ‘restored Cicero and Virgil to the list of monastic studies, and left its stamp on the pedantic style, the profuse classical quotations of writers like William of Malmesbury or John of Salisbury.’ One of the earliest works in Scottish literature is the translation of the Aeneid by Gawain Douglas. It is characteristic of the rudimentary state of learning at the time when this translation appeared that the Sibyl is represented as a nun, who directs Aeneas to tell his beads[105]. But the greatest testimony to the persistence of Virgil’s fame and influence in the western world is the homage which the genius of Dante pays to the shade of his great [pg 66]countryman. ‘May the long zeal avail me and the great love that made me search thy volume. Thou art my master and my author. Thou art he from whom I took the good style that did me honour[106].’ The feeling with which Dante gives himself up to the guidance of Virgil through all the mystery of the lower realms is like that under which Ennius evokes the shade of Homer from the ‘halls of Acheron’ to interpret to him the secrets of creation. Dante combines the reverence for a great master, which seems to be more natural to the genius of Italy than to that of other nations, with a high self-confidence and a bold and original invention. Lucretius expresses a similar enthusiasm for Homer, Ennius, Empedocles, and Epicurus; and by Virgil the same feeling is, though not directly expressed, yet profoundly felt towards Homer and Lucretius. And in all these cases the admiration of their predecessors is an incentive, not to imitative reproduction, but to new creation. It was as the poet of ‘that Italy for which Camilla the virgin, Euryalus, and Turnus and Nisus died of wounds’ that the poet of mediaeval Florence paid homage to the ancient poet of Mantua. The admiration of Dante, like that of Tacitus, is the more corroborative of the spell exercised over the Italian mind by the art and style of Virgil from the difference in the type of genius and character which these poets severally represent. The influence of Virgil was exercised, with a power more over-mastering and injurious to their originality, upon the later poets and scholars of Italy with whom the Renaissance begins. The progress of modern poetry was for a long time accompanied—and it would be difficult to say whether it was thereby more obstructed or advanced—by a new undergrowth of Latin poetry, for the higher forms of which Virgil served as the principal model. Petrarch attached more importance to his epic poem of ‘Africa,’ written in imitation of the rhythm and style of the Aeneid, than to his Sonnets. The influence of Virgil on the later Renaissance in Italy is abundantly proved in [pg 67]the works of poets, scholars, and men of letters in that age. Ninety editions of his works are said to have been published before the year 1500[107]. From Italy this influence passed to France and England, and was felt, not by scholars and critics only, but by the great poets and essayists, the orators and statesmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was discussed as an open question whether the Iliad or the Aeneid was the greater epic poem: and it was then necessary for the admirers of the Greek rather than of the Latin poet to assume an apologetic tone[108]. Scaliger ranked Virgil above Homer and Theocritus. His prestige was greatest during the century of French ascendency in modern literature, that, namely, between the age of Milton and that of Lessing. The chief critical law-giver in that century was Voltaire, and no great critic has ever expressed a livelier admiration of any poem than he has of the Aeneid. It is to him we owe the saying, ‘Homère a fait Virgile, dit-on; si cela est, c’est sans doute son plus bel ouvrage[109].’ He claims elsewhere for the second, fourth, and sixth books of the Aeneid a great superiority over the works of all Greek poets[110]. He says also that the Aeneid is the finest monument remaining from antiquity. As Spenser was called the ‘poet’s poet,’ so Virgil might be called the orator’s poet. Even by a rhetorician of the second century the question was discussed whether Virgil ‘was more a poet or an orator[111].’ Bossuet is said to have known his works by heart[112]. In the great era of English oratory, no author seems to have been so familiarly known or was so often quoted. We read in a recent sketch of the life of Burke[113], ‘Most writers have constantly beside them some favourite classical author, from whom they [pg 68]endeavour to take their prevailing tone.... Burke, according to Butler, always had a ragged Delphin Virgil not far from his elbow.’ A vestige of the attraction which his words had for an older school of English politicians may be traced in the survival of Virgilian quotation in some of the parliamentary warfare of recent times. The important place which Virgil has filled in the teaching of our public schools—the great nurses of our classic statesmen—has perhaps not been without some influence in shaping our national history[114]. It would be no exaggeration to say that the poems of Virgil, and especially the Aeneid, have contributed more than any other works of art in modern times, not only to stamp the impression of ancient Rome on the imagination, but to educate the sensibility to generous emotion as well as to literary beauty. There is probably no author, even at the present day, of whom some knowledge may be with more certainty assumed among cultivated people of every nation.
II.
This unbroken ascendency of eighteen centuries, which might almost be described in the words applied by Lucretius to the ascendency of Homer—
Adde Heliconiadum comites; quorum unus Homerus
Sceptra potitus[115]—