his inspiration were Homer and love of Rome; add, for a time, Theocritus.
Lover of the country and of moral life, he first wrote those delicious
_Bucolics_ wherein he did not venture to be as realistic as the
Sicilian poet, but in which there is not only infinite grace and delicate
sensibility, but also, in certain verses, admirable descriptions that
arouse memories of those of La Fontaine. Lover of the soil and desirous,
in harmony with Augustus, to attract the Italians back to a taste for
agriculture, he wrote the _Georgics_: that is, the toils of the
field, describing these labours with singular exactitude and precision;
then, to give the reader variety, he introduced from time to time an
episode which is a fragment of history or of mythological legend. At
length, desirous of attributing to Rome the most glorious past possible,
he revived the old legend which claimed that the ancient kings of Rome
descended from the famous kings of Troy in her zenith, and he composed
the _Aeneid_. The _Aeneid_ is at once both an _Odyssey_ and an
_Iliad_. The first five books containing the adventures of
Aeneas after the fall of Troy until his arrival in Italy form an
_Odyssey_; the last six books, containing the combats of Aeneas in
Italy in order to conquer a place for himself, form an _Iliad_. In
the middle, the sixth book is a descent into hell, again an imitation of
Homer, yet altogether new, enriched as it is with very fine philosophical
ideas which Homer could never have known. The main theme of the poem and
what gives it unity is Rome, which does not yet exist, but which is
always to be seen looming in the future. All the poem leans in that
direction, and alike by ingenious artifices, by prophecies more and more
exact, by the description of the shield of Aeneas, Roman history itself,
in its broad lines, is traced.

The sovereign merit of Virgil is his artistic sense. Others are more
powerful or more profound. No man has written better verse than he on any