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Natural science was unable yet to flourish. Mediæval education was humanistic, but the old springs of this form of study were nearly dried up. The Greek classics were entirely lost. Even the few Latin classics that the mediævals possessed, they did not understand aright. To Virgil's Æneid they gave a Christian interpretation!
Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden: but let those things alone and go to man, for whom as the other things are, so it seemeth in him her uttermost cunning is employed, and know whether she have brought forth so true a lover as Theagenes, so constant a friend as Pylades, so valiant a man as Orlando, so right a prince as Xenophon's Cyrus: so excellent a man every way, as Virgil's Aneas.
A tradition, which the dates make improbable, was that Gaius Octavius, afterwards the Emperor Augustus, was for a time his fellow-scholar under the rhetorician Epidius. In the classroom of the Epicurean Siro he may have made his first acquaintance with the poetry of Lucretius. For the next ten years we know nothing of Virgil's life, which no doubt was that of a profound student.
On the contrary, all we really know about it is from two treatises of Plato, the Gorgias and the Phaedo, and the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid. "I take it from a holier source: St. Gregory," said Jerome sternly. "Like enough," replied Colonna drily. "But St. Gregory was not so nice; he took it from Virgil. Some souls, saith Gregory, are purged by fire, others by water, others by air. "Says Virgil
Ovid takes it up after him even in the same age, and makes an ancient heroine of Virgil's new-created Dido; dictates a letter for her, just before her death, to the ingrateful fugitive; and, very unluckily for himself, is for measuring a sword with a man so much superior in force to him on the same subject. I think I may be judge of this, because I have translated both.
But the appositeness of these allusions having passed, the verse being only beautiful, the maxims being only noble and just, and the piece being cold, people no longer felt anything more than the coldness. Nothing is more beautiful than Virgil's second canto; recite it on the stage, it will bore: on the stage one must have passion, live dialogue, action.
And Mommsen, by speaking of "successes like that of the Aeneid" evidently inclines towards the same view. It must be conceded that Virgil's genius lacked heroic fibre, invention, dramatic power. He had not an idea of "that stern joy that warriors feel," so necessary to one who would raise a martial strain. The passages we remember best are the very ones that are least heroic.
The books were: Diana of the Crossways, Richard Feverel, Henri Lavedan's Le Duel, Maeterlinck's Pelleas et Mélisande, Don Quixote de la Mancha, in Spanish, a volume of Virgil's Eclogues, and the Life of the Chevalier Bayard, by the Loyal Servitor. Ste. Marie stared at her. "Do you read Spanish," he demanded, "and Latin, as well as French and English?" "My mother was Spanish," said she.
It is here that Virgil's tomb is to be found, and it is said that laurels grow upon it, but I must confess that I saw none. In the evenings I walked on the seashore; I frequently took my daughter, and we often remained sitting there together until moonrise, enjoying the salubrious air and the gorgeous view.
The dat. and abl. sing. are the only terminations that were not affected. We see the gradual deterioration of quantity, and are not surprised that even before the time of Claudian a strict knowledge of it was confined to the most learned poets. There is a very frequent feature in Virgil's poetry which we may compare to the parallelism well known as the chief characteristic of Hebrew verse.
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