elegiac piece, the _Copa,_ is of admirable vivacity and grace, and the
touch in it is so singularly unlike the Virgilian manner as to tempt one
into the paradox of its authenticity. That Virgil wrote much which he
deliberately destroyed is obviously certain; his fastidiousness and his
melancholy alike drove him towards the search after perfection, and his
mercilessness towards his own work may be measured by his intention to
burn the _Aeneid_. Not less by this passionate desire of unattainable
perfection than by the sustained glory of his actual achievement,--his
haunting and liquid rhythms, his majestic sadness, his grace and pity,--
he embodies for all ages that secret which makes art the life of life
itself.




II.

HORACE.


In that great turning-point of the world's history marked by the
establishment of the Roman Empire, the position of Virgil is so unique
because he looks almost equally forwards and backwards. His attitude
towards his own age is that of one who was in it rather than of it. On
the one hand is his intense feeling for antiquity, based on and
reinforced by that immense antiquarian knowledge which made him so dear
to commentators, and which renders some of his work so difficult to
appreciate from our mere want of information; on the other, is that
perpetual brooding over futurity which made him, within a comparatively
short time after his death, regarded as a prophet and his works as in