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The Works of Virgil Rendered Into Engl. Prose, With Intr. [
The Works of Virgil Rendered Into Engl Prose With Intr Author:Publius Vergilius Maro General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1871 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: INTRODUCTION TO THE ENEID. Virgil in the Eclogues had described pastoral life amidst the homes of the rude shepherds, but presently he came forth from the woods into the neighbouring fields of the farmers, lastly he was known as the poet of war and religion and policy. As he had before his eyes the city which was the mistress of the world, a city of marble, filled with temples and palaces, enjoying peace both from foreign wars and civil disturbances, as he beheld the closed gates of the mystical Janus, it was natural he should be filled with the desire of celebrating the divine origin of the great republic. But when he who had been enabled to give such perfection to the Georgics as to make them as finished a poem as ever had been written found his days suddenly cut short, it was natural that a poet so fastidious in the structure of his verses should direct that his unfinished poem should be committed to the flames. And yet, though the JEneid bears some marks of an unfinished production, one can hardly agree with Richter that Virgil was right to condemn his epic to the fire, if of the poem, as in the case of Hercules on mount ?ta, only the mortal part of it, that is, the hero, yEneas, had been reduced to ashes, while the immortal part, the episodes and descriptions, had been preserved ; still less would most readers admit the criticism of Niebuhr that the poem was from the beginning to the end a misconceived idea. For almost as much as the Homeric poems are the representation of the heroical life of Greece, almost as in Dante we have a living record of mediaeval faith and opinion, so has the neid been ...« less