would not have been altogether unreasonable; but it is rather as
an authority on all points of philosophy, than as a work of
imagination, that he values the Aeneid. The most trivial
passages he regards as oracles of the highest authority, and of
the most recondite meaning. He describes his conductor as the
sea of all wisdom--the sun which heals every disordered sight.
As he judged of Virgil, the Italians of the fourteenth century
judged of him; they were proud of him; they praised him; they
struck medals bearing his head; they quarrelled for the honour of
possessing his remains; they maintained professors to expound his
writings. But what they admired was not that mighty imagination
which called a new world into existence, and made all its sights
and sounds familiar to the eye and ear of the mind. They said
little of those awful and lovely creations on which later critics
delight to dwell--Farinata lifting his haughty and tranquil brow
from his couch of everlasting fire--the lion-like repose of
Sordello--or the light which shone from the celestial smile of
Beatrice. They extolled their great poet for his smattering of
ancient literature and history; for his logic and his divinity;
for his absurd physics, and his most absurd metaphysics; for
everything but that in which he pre-eminently excelled. Like the
fool in the story, who ruined his dwelling by digging for gold,
which, as he had dreamed, was concealed under its foundations,
they laid waste one of the noblest works of human genius, by
seeking in it for buried treasures of wisdom which existed only
in their own wild reveries. The finest passages were little
valued till they had been debased into some monstrous allegory.
Louder applause was given to the lecture on fate and free-will,
or to the ridiculous astronomical theories, than to those
tremendous lines which disclose the secrets of the tower of