some sense oracular. The _Sortes Vergilianae,_ if we may believe the
confused gossip of the Augustan History, were almost a State institution,
while rationalism was still the State creed in ordinary matters. Thus,
while, in a way, he represented and, as it were, gave voice to the Rome
of Augustus, he did so in a transcendental manner; the Rome which he
represents, whether as city or empire, being less a fact than an idea,
and already strongly tinged with that mysticism which we regard as
essentially mediaeval, and which culminated later without any violent
breach of continuity in the conception of a spiritual Rome which was a
kingdom of God on earth, and of which the Empire and the Papacy were only
two imperfect and mutually complementary phases; _quella Roma onde Cristo
e Romano,_ as it was expressed by Dante with his characteristic width and
precision.

To this mystical temper the whole mind and art of Virgil's great
contemporary stands in the most pointed contrast. More than almost any
other poet of equal eminence, Horace lived in the present and actual
world; it is only when he turns aside from it that he loses himself.
Certain external similarities of method there are between them--above
all, in that mastery of verbal technique which made the Latin language
something new in the hands of both. Both were laborious and indefatigable
artists, and in their earlier acquaintanceship, at all events, were close
personal friends. But the five years' difference in their ages represents
a much more important interval in their poetical development. The earlier
work of Horace, in the years when he was intimate with Virgil, is that
which least shows the real man or the real poet; it was not till Virgil,
sunk in his _Aeneid,_ and living in a somewhat melancholy retirement far
away from Rome, was within a few years of his death, that Horace, amid
the gaiety and vivid life of the capital, found his true scope, and
produced the work that has made him immortal.