Virgil made it; and it is not without difficulty that we can put ourselves back in the pre-Virgilian period, the pre-Virgilian habit of mind. Surprise has often been expressed that by the publication of the Eclogues Virgil should at once have obtained a success of enthusiasm which has hardly a parallel in literature. Ten short pieces, full of confused learning and of halting allegory; where the scenery is an impossible combination of Mantua, of Sicily, of Arcadia ; where the manners of country and court are mixed up in hopeless confusion; where line after line is translated, and sometimes positively mis-translated, from Theocritus; how should these poems have produced so extraordinary an effect? But the more we study them, the more that "magical inner sweetness overcomes us the more clearly we see that this was indeed a new thing in the world. Between the Idyls and the Eclogues a change has taken place comparable to the change in the twilight of a summer night between evening and morning: insensibly we have left one world, and entered upon another. The outlines are the same, even to those of the light clouds in the sky; but over all the face of Nature there has come a new spirit. All the wide and undefinable meaning included in the word romance suddenly breaks upon us. Atque utinam ex vobis unus, vestrique fuissem! the cry of the whole world, the sadness and beauty of life, has at last in words like these found perfect expression. this note of infinite tenderness, the same which later in the Georgics told of the lover's madness, " to be forgiven surely, if Death knew forgiveness," the same which later in the Æneid spoke of "the tears of things," that made Virgil from the first a new interpreter of life, a voice of one who knows all that may be known of sorrow and of hope. "Perhaps this is the reason," to quote Cardinal Newman's words, for in one sentence he has summed up the deepest Virgilian criticism, "of the medieval opinion about Virgil, as if a prophet

It is

or magician; his single words and phrases, his pathetic half-lines, giving utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time."

The greatest Greek literature has a perfection of form which has never been equalled; but that perfection is so consummate, and attained by means so simple, that it almost conceals itself, becoming dark with excess of brightness. The words seem to have fallen into their place inevitably: there is no trace of labour: it is as though what they saw or felt put itself into language by instinct and without effort. Beside Homer or Sophocles at their highest, even Milton, even Virgil sounds heavy and artificial.

Ἐπεὶ πέπρακται πᾶν τὸ τοῦ θεοῦ καλῶς,
χωρῶμεν.

so Sophocles says, and the terrible simplicity, the superhuman serenity of the words awes us into silence. With Dante again, as with Pindar, who stands alone among the Greeks, style is a passion. He flings himself upon style with a vehemence that makes everything go down before it : his language is raised as it were to a white heat, and burns where it touches. But Virgil is the perfect artist, dealing considerately with a difficult matter, melting a reluctant language in the sevenfold furnace of an intense imagination, forging and tempering, retempering and reforging, till the last trace of imperfection disappears. The finished. work carries the result of all the labour, but it is transformed into beauty. In Milton alone is there another instance of such superb continuity of workmanship, such ardour of genius fusing immense masses of intractable material and sustaining itself, by sheer force of style, at a height which is above danger, secure in its own strength. But the tenderness and sweetness of Virgil, come colui che piange e dice, is all his own. And to us it has come charged with the added sweetness of а thousand

memories: the wreck of the ancient world, the slow reconstruction of the Middle Ages, the vast movement of later times. The fanatical self-reproaches of Saint Augustine hardly conceal the stirring of heart with which he looks back to the clinging enchantment of the Eneid; and we may fancy that as he lay dying in Hippo, the clamour of the siege and the cries of Genseric and his Vandals mingled in his mind with the old unforgotten romance of his boyhood, the siege and sack of Troy, equus ligneus plenus armatis, et Troja incendium, atque ipsius umbra Creusa.1 The earliest dawn of new light upon England found Bede, in his northern monastery, making timid attempts to ropy the music of the Eclogues. Throughout the Middle Ages Virgil was a beneficent wizard, a romancewriter and a sorcerer, his name recurring strangely among all the greatest names of history or fable. To the scholarship of the Renaissance he

Aug. Conf. I. xiii. 4.

became a poet again, but still Prince of poets, still with something of divine attributes. For us, who inherit from all these ages, he is the gathered sum of what to all these ages he has been. But it is as a voice of Nature that he now appeals to us most; as a voice of one who in his strength and sweetness is not too steadfastly felicitous to have sympathy with human weakness and pain. Through the imperial roll of his rhythm there rises a note of all but intolerable pathos; and in the most golden flow of his verse he still brings us near him by a faint accent of trouble. This is why he beyond all other poets is the Comforter; and in the darkest times, when the turmoil within or around us, confusa sonus urbis et illætabile murmur, seems too great to sustain, we may still hear him saying, as Dante heard him in the solemn splendour of dawn on the Mountain of Purgatory: "My son, here may be agony, but not death; remember, remember!"

J. W. MACKAIL.

ON a wild March morning, gray with long banks of lowering cloud, we came over a bare ridge with hardly a tree in sight the very hedgerows had been succeeded by stone walls. Long weary fields of poor, thin land rose and fell in low, even slopes to the horizon on either hand. The very road itself seemed to become poorer and thinner as it dipped sharply over the hill, and pointed at the white, dusty-looking walls and gray roofs of a little huddling town. The only mark of interest at that distance was a broad Perpendicular church, with a stout, grave spire lying out to the right; the town. or village climbing on the left nearly to the top of the hill, and descending to the prosperous brimming stream that moved silently down the centre of the valley.

It did not look as if it would yield many memories to take away, that little town. It looked not so much remote from the world as limping behind it, like fashion-plates of the Exhibition year: it did not seem, from the top of the hill, old enough to be quaint, or retired enough to be simpleminded.

As the road began to pass between houses-low and mean enough, sometimes even deserted-came our first surprise; a magnificent Jacobean mansion (or early Georgian), three stories high, with a huge flight of steps up to the door, heavy frowning cornices and massive balustrades. So important indeed was it, with its three windows on each side of the door and its faint suggestion of oaken panelling within, that a prolonged scrutiny became necessary. Behind it, in among the houses and up along the hill, lay a tall walled garden with cedars and cypresses peeping over in sombre curiosity, and a quaint pavilion just

visible. The habitation of some ancient race of petty squires, justices of the peace, fresh-faced gentlemen, such as we see in old sporting-pictures, hunting three days a week over the long, low hills, and imbibing good port with plenty of fine local talk,like Ulysses in Ithaca, lords of a small domain. Is it only this distance from us, the consciousness that they are gone and will never come again to perplex us with their ways and deafen us with their noise, that inspires a kindly feeling for those roystering Georgian squires? The thought of them seems to bring a momentary sense of relief from the self-consciousness of modern days. We ourselves, lingering here opposite to the old comfortable house, are but an uneasy contrast to the old squire whom one can fancy standing on those steps to sniff the wind, and who would have cordially despised from the bottom of his heart one who could idle there thinking gentle thoughts, such as, God help him, he was never troubled with, about a race with whom he had so little in

common.

Then, as the houses grow thicker, it becomes more and more evident that we are in an old-world town. Among the walls crop up quaint hood-mouldings and corbels, old archways filled with wrinkled oaken doors, curious grotesque heads of kings and devils extruded from mouldering eaves; till we turn the corner and find ourselves in a broad street, or rather marketplace, half a mile in length, suggesting immemorial horse-fairs and crowded with all manner of quaint, incongruous houses, some, like the aforesaid Georgian mansion, retiring a little behind excellent ironwork. We note too some peaked Gothic gables, and not a few Elizabethan bow-windows

notably those of the old inn opposite, mullioned and diamond-paned. Then we loiter into a decayed coaching inn, under a broad, square archway, through which many a four-in-hand, Highflyer or Swallow, must have rattled merrily enough now, alas! nothing but a depot of the Cyclist's Touring Club.

Mine host is lounging under the archway, inclined to grumble genially at the general decay of valuable institutions, and the lamentable want of progress so characteristic of the age. He tells us that he has held the house

for many years and paid no rent at all-yet he would be glad if we would take it off his hands on the same terms! "No one comes to Burford now," he says. "Maybe you passed a big house in the town on the Oxford road?" "We did indeed." "That lets for twenty-five pounds a yearstabling for eight horses!"

We are served in a big, high room, adorned with stuffed foxes and hawks, by an ancient wench with frizzled hair in curl-papers. She, the host tells us, can remember the good old days when Burford had a race-meeting, which His Majesty George the Third did. them the honour to attend, and can remember seeing the King stand in the street with his hat off to the loyal crowd, with his protruding, heavylidded eyes and face the colour of new blotting-paper. That was when insanity had washed the mischief out of him, and he was able to confine himself to his healthy domestic life, like the stiff, honest country gentleman that he was. Poor old king! he never discovered that principle extended beyond the limits of private life public conscience was an known possibility to him. He strolled about Burford that day and admired the town, somewhat in the style of the memorable scene at Gloucester, when he went down before breakfast to see the bridge, followed by a gaping throng. Well, my lads, so this is Gloucester new bridge?" said he.

un

"Yes, your Majesty." "Why, then, let's have a huzzay!" after which

intellectual treat he went quietly home to breakfast!

And this is Burford, with its ancient corporate privileges identical with Oxford, with its Council and Burgesses: a town that has fallen as completely out of date as its antique custom of carrying a dragon round. the town on midsummer-ere to commemorate some immemorial Saxon slaughter, when a banner with a gold dragon was among the spoils.

The quietest spot on one of the

circle of hills is still called Battle Edge, and is occupied by a little farm ; and yet it is not so long ago since bones and coins were ploughed up, and a confused mass of rusted metal and rotten ash-staves that was perhaps a trophy-heap of spears. Since then wholesale slaughter has kept very much out of sight there. Death has made his visits here as elsewhere; but he has made them respectably, with the Doctor and the Parson, the hatband and the gray headstone.

As we stroll down the village the sun comes out and lights up the irregular house fronts with a genial beam. Halfway down, a little side street of low, quaint houses gives a view of a great entrance-gate and a stone wall. On the top of one gate-post a lion still ramps, and the ironwork still hangs on its hinges; but the other post is down, dislodged by some biting frost. The poor lion lies unregarded, dismembered seven or eight yards, too, of wall are down, and so ancient is the breach that there is a regular right of way into the little park beyond. "What is that?" we say. "The old Manor, sir." That must certainly be visited; and so we too pass in through the breach and stand below the elms and sycamores through which the grass grown drive winds up.

Over

Shades of the romantic, what a house-a gabled manor with tall oriels, all overgrown with ivy. the door is the great Warwick shield supported by the two bears with ragged staves. In some of the windows the diamond-panes still linger:

through others you can see into deserted rooms, where the paper still hangs in shreds upon the wall: through others you see only the sky. The old house is settling to its doom: there is an ugly crack across its face, and the corner gable is at a sinister slope. To the right goes a low terraced walk, finishing in a chapel, built in that wonderful mixture of Renaissance and Gothic, almost flamboyant, of which Saint Mary's portico at Oxford with its twisted pillars is an instance. Fragments of stained glass hang in the clumsy tracery of the window, and a great snake-like branch of ivy thrusts out of the rosewindow at the eastern end. The roof bows and gapes with many a rent: the floor is covered with beds of rotting leaves: behind it stretch old orchard-closes and walled gardens, where neither fruit nor flowers grow, up to a little dense wood. The whole place is a silent vision of ancient decaying splendour. In truth this old house has had strange vicissitudes. Built, as the armorial lintel shows, by the old earls of Warwick, it came by purchase into the possession of the Lord Chief Justice Tanfield in the time of Queen Elizabeth. Tanfield's daughter and heiress married the first Lord Falkland; but the old judge, a man of irascible temper, disapproving of the match, passed over both his daughter and son-in-law in his will, and left the place together with an estate at Great Tew near Oxford to his grandson, the famous Lord Falkland.

When young Lucius Cary, as he was then called, made a match with the sister of his idealised friend Sir Charles Morrison, his father, Lord Falkland, who had destined him to some higher and wealthier connection, first endeavoured to reason him out of his folly; and then in obstinate soldierly fashion gave him to understand that as he could not punish him in any more material way (seeing that he had already succeeded to his grandfather's estates), he would have noth

ing more to do with either of them. Young Cary, passionately faithful to his father, had never meant to be undutiful; but he was firm about his marriage. To show his dutifulness, however, and to give his father the opportunity of chastening him if he wished, he offered to give up the two estates, and actually had a deed of gift prepared, which the angry father indignantly refused.

After this Falkland settled at Great Tew to his life of scholastic leisure, attracted by the proximity of Oxford. We do not hear of his living at Burford, though he was no doubt often there, as it is within easy riding distance of Tew. But it was at Tew that his court of intellect was held, where every friend of the host might arrive and order his room and dinner, might come and go unknown to any Falkland was a figure that politicians cannot afford to forget. was not particularly clear-headedwhat politicians are ?-but he carried into his business an utter unselfishness, a wholesome fire, and an intensity of feeling for principle which already seem characteristic of an older world.

one.

He

From Falkland's heirs the estate at Burford passed to a man of very different type-William type-William Lenthall, Master of the Rolls, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Speaker of a House of Commons quite as enthusiastic as, and probably more irritating even than that body at the present time. Why he was chosen it is hard to say. He was not very wise or popular, being a timid and cautious politician with no particular views of his own. The only remarkable thing about him indeed seems to have been his talent for amassing money, and his anxiety to conceal the fact; thus this very estate was obtained under an assumed name. His later life, we are told, was spent in arranging his huge revenues, and whatever he touched turned to gold. He pur chased Burford of Falkland's heirs for seven thousand pounds, and found