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The providence which guided us in the past still protects us; we have no right to be discouraged, and our future is assured us under the same gods who brought our fathers out of the land of the Trojans, through the midst of the Greeks. But there is concealed in the Aeneid another lesson, much more directly useful to Augustus.
It here and there wants the final touches of arrangement; one or two discussions are promised and not given; some paragraphs are repeated, and others have not been worked into their proper place; but substantially, as in the case of the Aeneid, we have the complete poem before us, and know perfectly within what limits it might have been altered or improved by fuller revision.
After he had faced the bitter fact that he was to leave the 'Aeneid' unfinished, and had decreed that the great canvas, crowded with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than survive him unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of the 'Georgics, where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to himself, with the thankfulness of a good man, 'I was the first to bring the Muse into my country.
Rivalling, or rather on some occasions surpassing his glorious predecessor in the characters of heroes and of gods, he sustains their dignity with so uniform a lustre, that they seem indeed more than mortal. Whether the Iliad or the Aeneid be the more perfect composition, is a question which has often been agitated, but perhaps will never be determined to general satisfaction.
"A proof," said Augustus, dryly, to Paul, "that by prudence and exertion even in those places where a man cannot turn himself he may manage to turn a penny." "Relate at large, my godlike guest," she said, "The Grecian stratagems, the town betrayed!" DRYDEN: Virgil, AEneid, book ii. Descending thence, they 'scaped! Ibid.
A boy, who declares his purpose of learning the AEneid by heart, will be held as being successful if at the end of the given period he can repeat eleven books out of the twelve. Nevertheless the reporter, in summing up the achievement, is bound to declare that that other book has not been learned.
Virgil called upon me in every line for some new word, and I paid so long that I was almost bankrupt; so that the latter end must needs be more burthensome than the beginning or the middle; and consequently the twelfth AEneid cost me double the time of the first and second. What had become of me, if Virgil had taxed me with another book?
I like the story of the Odyssey much better ; and this not on account of the wonderful things which it contains; for there are wonderful things enough in the Aeneid; the ships of the Trojans turned to sea-nymphs, the tree at Polydorus's tomb dropping blood. The story of the Odyssey is interesting, as a great part of it is domestick.
" An English ambassador, at the court of Philip II.'s viceroy, could indulge himself in imaginary prelections on the AEneid, in the last days of July, of the year of our Lord 1588! The Doctor, however to do him justice had put the questions categorically, to his Highness as he had been instructed to do.
In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, in the later version, Virgil shows a new method and a new power. It stands between the idyl and the epic, but it is the epic method towards which it tends. No return upon the earlier manner was thenceforth possible; with many searchings of heart, with much occasional despondency and dissatisfaction, he addressed himself to the composition of the Aeneid.
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