ADVERTISEMENT.

This volume of the Series was to have been undertaken by the late Mr Conington. None can be more sensible than the present writer of the loss which all readers have sustained in the substitution rendered necessary by his lamented death.

The Editor begs to acknowledge the courteous permission of Mr Conington’s representatives and publishers to make full extracts from his admirable version of the Æneid.{1}

INTRODUCTION.

Virgil has always been, for one reason or other, the most popular of all the old classical writers. His poems were a favourite study with his own countrymen, even in his own generation; within fifty years of his death they were admitted to the very questionable honour, which they have retained ever since, of serving as a text-book for schoolboys. The little Romans studied their Æneid, from their master’s dictation, as regularly, and probably with quite as much appreciation of its beauties, as the fourth form of an English public school, and wrote “declamations” of some kind upon its heroes. In the middle ages, when Greek literature had become almost a deserted field, and Homer in the original was a sealed book even to those who considered themselves and were considered scholars, Virgil was still the favourite with young and old. The monks in their chronicles, philosophers in their secular studies, enlivened their pages with quotations from the one author with whom no man of letters would venture to confess himself wholly unacquainted. The{2} works

of Virgil had passed through above forty editions in Europe before the first printed edition of Homer appeared from the Florence press in 1448. He has been translated, imitated, and parodied in all the chief European languages. The fate of Dido, of Pallas, and of Euryalus, has drawn tears from successive generations of which the poet never dreamed.

In the middle ages his fame underwent a singular transformation. From the magic power of song the transition seems incongruous to the coarser material agency of the wizard. But so it was; Virgilius the poet became, in mediæval legends, Virgilius the magician. One of his Eclogues (the Eighth), in which are introduced the magical charms by which it is sought to reclaim a wandering lover, is supposed to have given the first impulse to this superstitious belief. All kinds of marvels were attributed to his agency. It was said that he built at Rome, for the Emperor Augustus, a wondrous tower, in which were set up emblematic figures of all the subject nations which acknowledged the imperial rule, each with a bell in its hand, which rang out whenever war or revolt broke out in that particular province, so that Rome knew at once in what direction to march her legions. In the same building—so the legend ran—he contrived a magic mirror, in which the enemies of the Empire could be seen when they appeared in arms; and another—surely the most

terrible agency that was ever imagined in the way of domestic police—in which the guilt of any Roman citizen could be at once seen and detected. A fount of perpetual fire, and salt-springs of medicinal{3} virtue, were said to have been the gifts of the great enchanter to the Roman populace. At Naples the marvels which were attributed to his agency were scarcely less; and even now there is scarcely any useful or ornamental public work of early date, in the neighbourhood of that city, which is not in some way connected by vulgar tradition with the name of Virgil. The wondrous powers thus ascribed to him were, according to some legends, conferred upon him by Chiron the learned centaur—by whom the great Achilles, and the poet’s own hero, Æneas, were said to have been educated; by others, with that blending of pagan belief with Christian which is so commonly found in mediæval writers, they were referred to direct communication with the Evil One.[1]

French scholars have always had the highest appreciation of the Augustan poet, and his popularity{4} in England is to this day as great as ever. Even a practical House of Commons, not always very patient of argument, and notoriously impatient of some prosaic speakers, will listen to a quotation from Virgil—especially when pointed against a political opponent. Those to whom his rolling measure is familiar still quote him and cheer him so enthusiastically, that others listen with more or less appreciation. To the many who have almost forgotten what they once knew of him, his lines awake reminiscences of their youth—which are always pleasant: while even those to whom he is a sound and nothing more, listen as with a kind of sacred awe. The debates of our reformed Parliament will certainly be duller, if ever Virgil comes to be proscribed as an unknown tongue.

English translators of Virgil have abounded. But the earliest and by no means the least able of those who presented the Roman poet to our northern islanders in their own vernacular was a Scotsman, Bishop Gawain Douglas of Dunkeld, that clerkly son of old Archibald “Bell-the-Cat” whom Scott names in his ‘Marmion.’ Few modern readers of Virgil are likely to be proficients in the ancient northern dialect which the bishop used; but those who can appreciate him maintain that there is considerable vigour as well as faithfulness in his version. Thomas Phaer, a Welsh physician, was the next who made the attempt, in the long verses known as Alexandrine, in 1558. A few years later came forth what might fairly be called the comic English version, though undertaken in the most serious earnest by the{5} translator. This was Richard Stanyhurst, an Irishman, a graduate of Oxford and student of Lincoln’s Inn. He seems to have been the original prophet of that “pestilent heresy,” as Lord Derby calls it, the making of English hexameters; for

that was the metre which he chose, and he congratulates himself in his preface upon “having no English writer before him in this kind of poetry.” Without going so far as to endorse Lord Derby’s severe judgment, it may be confessed that Stanyhurst did his best to justify it. His translation, which he ushered into public with the most profound self-satisfaction, is quite curious enough to account for its reprint by the “Edinburgh Printing Society” in 1836. One of the points upon which he prides himself is the suiting the sound to the sense, which Virgil himself has done happily enough in some rare passages. So when he has to translate the line,

he does it as follows:—

When he has to express the Cyclops forging the thunderbolts, it is

and very much more of the same kind.

The Earl of Surrey and James Harrington tried their hand at detached portions, and although the quaint conceits which were admired in their day have little charm for the modern reader, there is not want{6}ing, especially in the former, a spirit and vigour in which, some of those who came before and after them lamentably failed. The translations by Vicars and Ogilby, about the middle of the seventeenth century, have little claim to be remembered except as the first presentations of the whole Æneid in an English poetical dress. In dull mediocrity they are about equal.

In 1697, Dryden, at the age of sixty-six, finished and published his translation; written, as he pathetically says, “in his declining years, struggling with want, and oppressed with sickness;” yet, whatever be its shortcomings, a confessedly great work, and showing few traces of these unfavourable circumstances. His great renown, and the unquestionable vigour and ability of the versification, insured its popularity at once; and it was considered, by the critics of his own and some succeeding generations, as pre-eminently the English Virgil. Dr Johnson said of it that “it satisfied his friends and silenced his enemies.” It may still be read with pleasure, but it has grave faults. Independently of its general looseness and diffuseness, in many passages amounting to the vaguest paraphrase, there are too many instances in which, not content with making his author say a good many things which he never did say, he palpably misinterprets him. There are many passages of much vigour and beauty; but even of these it has been said, and not unfairly, by a later

translator, Dr Trapp, that “where you most admire Dryden, you see the least of Virgil.” Dryden had the advantage of consulting in manuscript a translation by the Earl of Lauderdale{7} (afterwards published), which has considerable merit, and to which in his preface he confesses obligations “not inconsiderable.” They were, in fact, so considerable as this, that besides other hints in the matter of words and phrases, he borrowed nearly four hundred lines in different places, with scarcely an attempt at change.

Dryden was followed by various other translators more or less successful. Pitt and Symmons, the latter especially, might have earned a greater reputation had they preceded instead of followed the great poet whose laurels they plainly challenged by adopting his metre. But the recent admirable translation of the Æneid into the metre of Scott by Mr Conington will undoubtedly take its place henceforward as by far the most poetical, as it is also the most faithful and scholarly, rendering of the original.{8}

THE POET.

Publius Virgilius Maro—such was his full name, though we have abbreviated the sounding Roman appellatives into the curt English form of “Virgil”—lived in the age when the great Roman Empire was culminating to its fall, but as yet showed little symptom of decay. The emperor under whom he was born was that Octavianus Cæsar, nephew of the great Julius, whose title of “Augustus” gave a name to his own times which has since passed into a common term for the golden age of literature in every nation. In the Augustan age of Rome rose and flourished, in rapid succession, a large proportion of those great writers to whose works we have given the name of classics. This brilliant summer-time of literature was owing to various causes—to the increase of cultivation and refinement, to the leisure and quiet which followed after long years of war and civil commotion; but in part also it was owing to the character of the Roman emperor himself. Both Augustus and his intimate{9} friend and counsellor Mæcenas were the professed patrons of letters and of the fine arts. Mæcenas was of the

highest patrician blood of Rome. He claimed descent from the old Etruscan kings or Lucumos—those ancient territorial chiefs who ruled Italy while Rome was yet in her infancy, such as Lars Porsena of Clusium. Clever and accomplished, an able statesman in spite of all his indolence, Mæcenas had immense influence with Augustus. At his splendid palace on the Esquiline Hill—the Holland House of the day—met all the brilliant society of Rome, and his name very soon became a synonym for a liberal patron of art and literature. To be eminent in any branch of these accomplishments was to insure the notice of the minister; and to be a protégé of his was an introduction at once, under the happiest auspices, to the emperor himself. Such good fortune occurred to Virgil early in his life.

He was born in the little village of Andes (probably the modern Pietola), near Mantua, and received a liberal education, as is sufficiently evident from the many allusions in his poems. When grown to manhood, he seems to have lived for some years with his father upon his modest family estate. He suffered, like very many of his countrymen—his friend and fellow-poet Horace among the number—from the results of the great civil wars which so long desolated Italy, and which ended in the fall of the Republic at the battle of Philippi. The district near Mantua was assigned and parcelled out among the legionaries who had fought for Antony and young{10} Octavianus against Pompey. Cremona had espoused the cause of the latter, and Mantua, as Virgil himself tells us, suffered for the sins of its neighbour. His little estate was confiscated, amongst others, to reward the veterans who had claims on the gratitude of Octavianus. But through the intercession of some powerful friend who had influence with the young emperor—probably Asinius Pollio, hereafter

mentioned, who was prefect of the province—they were soon restored to him. This obligation Virgil never forgot; and amongst the many of all ranks who poured their flattery into the ears of Augustus (as Octavianus must be henceforth called), perhaps that of the young Mantuan poet, though bestowed with something of a poet’s exaggeration, was amongst the most sincere. The first of his Pastorals was written to express his gratitude for the indulgence which had been granted him. If the Cæsar of the day was susceptible of flattery, at least he liked it good of its kind. “Stroke him awkwardly,” said Horace, “and he winces like a restive horse.” But the verse of the Mantuan poet had the ring of poetry as well as compliment.

These Pastorals (to be more particularly noticed hereafter) were his earliest work, composed, probably, between his twenty-seventh and thirty-fourth year, while he was still living a country life on his newly-recovered farm. They seem to have attracted the favourable attention of Mæcenas; and soon, among the brilliant crowd of courtiers, statesmen, artists, poets, and historians who thronged the audience-chamber of the popular minister, might be seen the{11} tall, slouching, somewhat plebeian figure of the young country poet.[2] He soon became a familiar guest there; but although Augustus himself, half in jest, was said to have spoken of his minister’s literary dinners as a “table of parasites,” it is certain Virgil never deserved the character. This intimacy with Mæcenas must have led to frequent and prolonged visits to Rome; but his chief residence, after he left his Mantuan estate, seems to have been at Naples. It was at the suggestion of this patron that he set about the composition of his poem upon Roman

agriculture and stock-breeding—the four books of Georgics. His greatest and best-known work—the Æneid—was begun in obedience to a hint thrown out by a still higher authority, though he seems to have long had the subject in his thoughts, and probably had begun to put it into shape. Augustus had condescended to ask the poet to undertake some grander theme than an imaginary pastoral life or the management of the country farm. The result was the Æneid, modelled upon the two great poems of Homer—in fact, a Roman Iliad and Odyssey combined in one. It was never completely finished, for Virgil, whose health was at no time robust, died before he had put in the finishing touches which his fastidious taste required. It is even said that in his last illness he would have burnt the copy, if his friends would have allowed the sacrifice. It is hardly{12} probable, as a German scholar has ingeniously suggested, that it was because the cruelties of Augustus’s later years made him repent of having immortalised a tyrant. He died in his fifty-first year, at

Brundusium, where he had landed in the suite of the emperor, whom he had met during a visit to Athens, and who brought him back with him to Italy. He was buried, as was the custom of the Romans, by the side of the public road leading out of Naples to Puteoli; and the tomb still shown to travellers, near Posilippo, as the last resting-place of the poet, may at least mark the real site. He died a comparatively rich man, possessed of a town-house at Rome, near the palace of Mæcenas, with a good library. Living, as he did, in the highest society of the capital, where he was very popular, he never forgot his old friends; and it is pleasant to read that he sent money to his aged parents regularly every year. So highly was he esteemed by his own cotemporaries, that on one occasion when he visited the theatre, the whole audience is said to have risen in a body and saluted him with the same honours which were paid to Augustus. He preserved to the last his simple manners and somewhat rustic appearance; and it is believed that his character, amongst all

the prevalent vices of Rome, remained free from reproach—saving only that with which he was taunted by the libertines of the capital, the reproach of personal purity. It is as much to his honour that Caligula should have ordered all his busts to be banished from the public libraries, as that St Augustin should have quoted him alone of heathen authors, in his celebrated ‘Confessions.{13}’

THE PASTORALS.

The earliest written poems of Virgil, as has been said, were his Pastorals. Of these we have ten remaining, sometimes called “Bucolics”—i. e., Songs of the Herdsmen—and sometimes “Eclogues,” as being “selections” from a larger number of similar compositions which the poet either never made public, or which at least are lost to us. The actual subjects of these poems are various, but they are usually introduced in the way of imaginary dialogue between Greek shepherds, keeping their flocks and herds at pasture in some imaginary woodland country, which the poet peoples with inhabitants and supplies with scenery at his will; mixing up, as poets only may, the features of his own Italian landscape with those of Sicily, borrowed, with much besides, from the Idylls of Theocritus, and with reminiscences of the Greek Arcadia. That pastoral faery-land, in which shepherds lay all day under beech-trees, playing on their pipes, either in rivalry for a musical prize or composing monodies on their lost loves, surely never existed in

fact, how{14}ever familiar to us in the language of ancient and modern poets. Such shepherds are as unreal as the satyrs and fauns and dryad-nymphs with whom a fanciful mythology had peopled the same region, and who are not unfrequently introduced by the pastoral poets in the company of their human dramatis personæ. The Arcadia of history was a rich and fertile district, well wooded and watered, and as prosaic as one of our own midland counties. Like them, if it had any reputation at all beyond that of being excellent pasture-ground, it was a reputation for dulness. It was celebrated for its breed of asses, and some of the qualities of the animal seem to have been shared by the natives themselves. “A slip of Arcadia” passed into a proverbial nickname for a boy who was the despair of his schoolmaster. The Arcadia of the poets and romance-writers, from classical times down to our own Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney, was, as Mr Conington says, “the poets’ golden land, in which imagination found a refuge from the harsh prosaic life of the

present.” This literary fancy enjoyed a remarkable popularity from the early days of authorship down to a very recent date. Thyrsis and Amaryllis, Daphnis and Corydon, have had a continued poetical existence of something like fifteen hundred years, and talk very much the same language in the Pastorals of Pope that they did in the Greek Idylls. It is curious, also, that when society itself has been most artificial, this affectation of pastoral simplicity seems to have been most in vogue. It was the effeminate courtiers of Augustus who lavished their applause and rewards upon Virgil when{15} he read to them these lays of an imaginary shepherd-life; how Galatæa was won by a present of a pair of wood-pigeons or a basket of apples, and how Melibœus thankfully went to supper with his friend Tityrus on roasted chestnuts and goat-milk cheese. Society in England had never less of the reality of pastoral simplicity than in the days when nearly every fine lady chose to be painted with a lamb or a crook—when the “bucolic cant,” as Warton