older poets, and refused to allow Virgil's preeminence. But for the
Roman world at large, as since for the world of the Latin races, Virgil
became what Homer had been to Greece, "the poet." The decay of art and
letters in the third century only added a mystical and hieratic element
to his fame. Even to the Christian Church he remained a poet sacred and
apart: in his profound tenderness and his mystical "yearning after the
further shore," as much as in the supposed prophecy of the fourth
Eclogue, they found and reverenced what seemed to them like an
unconscious inspiration. The famous passage of St. Augustine, where he
speaks of his own early love for Virgil, shows in its half-hysterical
renunciation how great the charm of the Virgilian art had been, and still
was, to him: _Quid miserius misero,_ he cries, _non miserante se ipsum,
et flente Didonis mortem quae fiebat amando Aeneam, non flente autem
mortem meam quae flebat non amando te? Deus lumen cordis mei, non te
amabam, et haec non flebam, sed flebam Didonem exstinctam, ferroque
extrema secutam, sequens ipse extrema condita tua relicto te![6] To the
graver and more matured mind of Dante, Virgil was the lord and master
who, even though shut out from Paradise, was the chosen and honoured
minister of God. Up to the beginning of the present century the supremacy
of Virgil was hardly doubted. Since then the development of scientific
criticism has passed him through all its searching processes, and in a
fair judgment his greatness has rather gained than lost. The doubtful
honour of indiscriminate praise was for a brief period succeeded by the
attacks of an almost equally undiscriminating censure. An ill-judged
partiality had once spoken of the _Aeneid_ as something greater than a
Roman _Iliad:_ it was easy to show that in the most remarkable Homeric
qualities the _Aeneid_ fell far short, and that, so far as it was an
imitation of Homer, it could no more stand beside Homer than the
imitations of Theocritus in the _Eclogues_ could stand beside Theocritus.
The romantic movement, with its impatience of established fames, damned