empty helmets of Philippi; and finally the lovely, the incomparable legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. The circumstances of the inclusion of this last would seem especially to throw light on the character of Virgil's poetic feeling in its pure state. According to Mackail, the Georgics originally ended with an encomium of Gallus, Virgil’s brilliant friend and fellow poet, then vice-regent of Egypt; but when Gallus disgraced himself, was recalled and exiled, and finally committed suicide, Virgil cancelled his conclusion and had to make shift for another. The episode of Orpheus and Eurydice seems so remote from the structure and style of the rest of the poem that one may guess that it was something which Virgil had written independently and merely happened to have about—in fact, that when he was not labouring over the ambitious semi-official themes of the Georgics and the Aeneid he dropped naturally into the writing of sweet sorrowful charming idyls—the dim shades drifting like birds driven by the winter storms, the rescued nymph vanishing like smoke between her lover's helpless hands, the unpetitionable gate-keeper of Hades barring the muddy stream, and the lover still vainly calling "Eurydice!" when his head has been riven from his body, till the last echo of his love has died with her name among the lonely river banks.
But what shall be said of the grand manner, which has been so savagely outlawed among us since the realists and the imagists have declared war upon rhetoric—which seems to prevent many intelligent people from supposing that there can be anything in Virgil at all? Well, there is probably a certain margin of rhetoric in everything that Virgil wrote; but it is not like the pseudo-classic rhetoric for which people probably mistake it; it is not like the rhetoric of of the Renaissance. It is silly to say, as I have heard people do, that Catullus is a genuine lyric poet and Virgil merely a goldsmith of noble sentiments (I even know one man who contends that Ovid was a more genuine poet than Virgil). The problem is to disengage Virgil's own lyric strain, which, though less varied than Catullus', is equally genuine. Besides, in the first place, Virgil should be forgiven even his emotionally uninteresting passages for his superb artistic integrity. One must remember that, though in both ancient and modern times he has exfloreated into all sorts of overpowering blossoms, he has also inspired in Dante the sharpest, the most sincere, and the least florid style which has perhaps ever been seen.
