intellectual development. He concludes that Virgil was not a peasant and the son of a humble potter, but the son of a landed proprietor who also owned a pottery; that he sat at the feet of Epicurean masters and was always Epicurean rather than Stoic; that the pastoral setting of the Eclogues is not an impossible medley, as Mackail, for instance, contends, but neither Mantuan nor Sicilian and merely the scenery of southern Italy; that Virgil was not driven out of his farm after the battle of Philippi, but was living comfortably at Naples at the time that the evictions occurred and wrote his poems on the subject merely as general protests in favour of Mantua; and decides many other controversial questions in unorthodox fashion. No doubt Professor Frank is very certain about a great many things which no one can know anything about—since the evidence on Roman civilization seems so incomplete as actually to make certainties in matters of this kind very difficult, at the same time that it is considerable enough to arouse scholars with a gift for the fiction of historical criticism into constructing any number of equally plausible and directly contradictory legends; but I cannot help sympathizing with Professor Frank in his hospitality toward the disputed poems, as I have been bored all too long by editors who, never having written a line of poetry themselves or known anybody else who has written one and consequently not understanding that the noblest of poets write also ribaldry and nonsense and that a man begins by imitating other poets and may write half a dozen styles before he has mastered his own, insist that Shakespeare could not have written the brothel scenes in Pericles because they do not sound the way Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale sound to people incapable of listening to what Shakespeare actually wrote, and that Virgil could not have written the Aetna because it sounds like an echo of Lucretius, when Virgil even in his maturest work was always in the habit of dropping into the manner of Lucretius when he wanted a passage of natural philosophy. In any case, Professor Frank, though he may build some of his statements about Virgil on rather an uncertain soil, brings Rome itself much nearer than such books usually do; one feels that he has been there to see and brought back a first-hand account. To him Maecenas and Cicero are contemporaries, not monuments. His forthcoming history of Rome should be of unusual interest. My only objection to his portrait of Virgil would be that he has concerned himself
