false lover begins at last to make his tardy excuses and apologies, the French critic fairly throws up his brief for the defence, and contents himself with the suggestion that this was one of those passages in the poem with which Virgil himself was dissatisfied, and which he must certainly have intended to correct. But Æneas has, in fact, little personal character of any kind. He is only what Keble calls him, "a shadow with a mighty name;" and that writer even goes so far as to suggest, that in the curse imprecated upon him by Dido, and her treatment of him in the Shades, we may see an intimation that the poet intended the abasement of his hero.[1]
Turnus will always find more favour in the eyes of modern readers than his rival. Our English sympathies do not run at all with the foreign adventurer who comes between him and his promised bride, and who claims both the lady and the kingdom by virtue of a convenient oracle. Mr Gladstone's may perhaps be only an ingenious fancy, that Turnus was really the favourite with the poet himself; that although he made Æneas victorious, as was required, in order to carry out the complimentary reference of the Roman origin to Troy, still the young chief of native Italian blood, maintaining a gallant struggle for his rights against gods and men, and only conquered at the last by supernatural force and fraud, was purposely held out to popular admiration. But we must, at least, feel sympathy with him as utterly over-weighted in the final struggle by the superior strength and immortal
- ↑ Prælect., ii. 724.
