forth; he knows not our laws, nor the madness of the courts, nor the
records of the common weal"--does not read the newspapers, in fact.

The sorrows of the poor, the luxury of the rich, the peril of the Empire,
the shame and dread of each day's news, we too know them; like Virgil we
too deplore them. We, in our reveries, long for some such careless
paradise, but we place it not in Sparta but in the Islands of the
Southern Seas. It is in passages of this temper that Virgil wins us
most, when he speaks for himself and for his age, so distant, and so
weary, and so modern; when his own thought, unborrowed and unforced, is
wedded to the music of his own unsurpassable style.

But he does not always write for himself and out of his own thought, that
style of his being far more frequently misapplied, wasted on telling a
story that is only of feigned and foreign interest. Doubtless it was the
"AEneid," his artificial and unfinished epic, that won Virgil the favour
of the Middle Aces. To the Middle Ages, which knew not Greek, and knew
not Homer, Virgil was the representative of the heroic and eternally
interesting past. But to us who know Homer, Virgil's epic is indeed,
"like moonlight unto sunlight;" is a beautiful empty world, where no real
life stirs, a world that shines with a silver lustre not its own, but
borrowed from "the sun of Greece."

Homer sang of what he knew, of spears and ships, of heroic chiefs and
beggar men, of hunts and sieges, of mountains where the lion roamed, and
of fairy isles where a goddess walked alone. He lived on the marches of
the land of fable, when half the Mediterranean was a sea unsailed, when
even Italy was as dimly descried as the City of the Sun in Elizabeth's
reign. Of all that he knew he sang, but Virgil could only follow and
imitate, with a pale antiquarian interest, the things that were alive for