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It is touching, however, to note that no text of Ezekiel or Jeremiah, but Virgil's musical hexameter, sounded through his soul the warning to depart. In this year Savonarola composed another poem, this time on the Ruin of the Church. In his boyhood he had witnessed the pompous shows which greeted Æneas Sylvius, more like a Roman general than a new-made Pope, on his entrance into Ferrara.
The chief talent of Virgil was propriety of thoughts, and ornament of words; Homer was rapid in his thoughts, and took all the liberties, both of numbers and of expressions, which his language, and the age in which he lived, allowed him: Homer's invention was more copious, Virgil's more confined; so that if Homer had not led the way, it was not in Virgil to have begun heroic poetry; for nothing can be more evident, than that the Roman poem is but the second part of the Ilias; a continuation of the same story, and the persons already formed; the manners of Aeneas are those of Hector superadded to those which Homer gave him.
A brief extract from one of the earlier chapters is not without interest, both as showing the practical Latin style, and as giving the prose groundwork of Virgil's stately and beautiful embroidery in the Georgics. Opera omnia mature conficias face. Nam res rustica sic est; si unam rem sero feceris, omnia opera sero facies.
"Well, sing to her," said Mowbray; "for my part, I am going to visit Plato, Justinian, Blackstone, whose lectures are better than Virgil's heroics, and Coke, who is more learned, if not more agreeable, than any Hesperians. Farewell." And Mowbray saluted Sir Asinus with a smile, and rode on. The knight returned his salute, and continued his way in the opposite direction.
The word rejicit, I know, will admit of both senses; but Jupiter having confessed that he could not alter fate, and being grieved he could not in consideration of Hercules, it seems to me that he should avert his eyes rather than take pleasure in the spectacle. But of this I am not so confident as the other, though I think I have followed Virgil's sense.
"You must saddle her," said I to Raymond, as I sat down again on a pile of buffalo robes: "Et hoec etiam fortasse meminisse juvabit." I thought, while with a painful effort I raised myself into the saddle. Half an hour after, even the expectation that Virgil's line expressed seemed destined to disappointment.
Virgil's father was a small freeholder in Andes, who farmed his own land, practised forestry and bee-keeping, and gradually accumulated a sufficient competence to enable him to give his son an only child, it would appear, of this marriage the best education that the times could provide.
Virgil's poetry is intended to be read, Racine's to be declaimed; and it is only in the theatre that one can experience to the full the potency of his art. In a sense we can know him in our library, just as we can hear the music of Mozart with silent eyes. But, when the strings begin, when the whole volume of that divine harmony engulfs us, how differently then we understand and feel!
But I believe most travellers have much nobler sensations in Virgil's tomb, and there is a great deal of testimony borne to their lofty sentiments on every scribbleable inch of its walls. Valery reminded me that Boccaccio, standing near it of old, first felt his fate decided for literature.
Burke and Windham travelled in Scotland together in 1785, and their conversation fell as often on old books as on Hastings or on Pitt. They discussed Virgil's similes; Johnson and L'Estrange, as the extremes of English style; what Stephens and A. Gellius had to say about Cicero's use of the word gratiosus.
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