l^; I 
 
 ...,., .>^-, 
 
 ^.S-??' 
 
 .*rtB'i- 
 
 _|fti5»ip^. 
 
 ■-?^ir 
 
 ri^:#- ."^•^*-:<' 
 
d^arnell UntaecBttg ffiihrary 
 
 Mlfuta, Nrm @ark 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GEFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1691 
 
PA 6826!S63 " """"'^ '■'""^ 
 
 .Sff.CJS?. Vergilianae: 
 
 3 1924 026 495 071 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this bool< is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://archive.org/details/cu31924026495071 
 
SORTES 
 VERGILIANAE 
 
 OR 
 
 VERGIL AND TO-DAY 
 
 AN INAUGURAL LECTURE 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL 
 
 BY 
 
 D. A. SLATER, M . A . 
 
 PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN THE UNIVERSITY 
 ON FRIDAY MAY 2/ I 92 I 
 
 OXFORD BASIL BLACKWELL 
 M • D C C C C • X X 1 1 
 
L'ENEIDE DE NOS JOURS ^ 
 
 BY THE LEADING of a star 
 Came Aeneas from afar, 
 Sailing up the promised stream 
 To the kingdom of his dream. 
 Dust was that which had been Troy; 
 Dido's death had murdered joy; 
 By the blue Sicilian bay 
 In his grave Anchises lay. 
 Years had fled, but faithful still 
 Flashed the star from hill to hill, 
 Beck'ning to another home, 
 Hov'ring o'er the site of Rome. 
 Peace or battle — who should say.'' — 
 In the lap of Fortune lay; 
 Little recked he what befell, 
 If he bore his burden well. 
 So the pilgrimage he made 
 To receive the accolade; 
 So, the runes of Fate to spell, 
 He descended into hell. 
 Knightly sword and steadfast soul — 
 Only these could gain the goal; 
 Self might perish, — if the race 
 Won and wore the pride of place. 
 
 Thus the Mantuan said, and thus 
 Says Aeneas unto us. 
 Transubstantiating still 
 Fickle heart and wayward will. 
 
 D. A. S. 
 
 ^Reprinted, by permission,Jrom the Westminster Gazette. 
 
SORTES 
 VERGILIANAE 
 
 WH E N, in process of time,a community like ours 
 has the misfortune to lose the services of a very 
 learned man, a captain of research,^ and to enlist 
 in his stead one whose chief claim to consideration, if claim 
 he has, rests upon the fact that the subject he professes has 
 been to him not merely a life-long study but also a life-long 
 inspiration and delight, and that he believes with all his 
 heart in the value of Latin for to-day, — common sense 
 would seem to dictate that the 'transient and embarrassed' 
 recruit in question, on being called up to deliver the lecture 
 which the custom of the country requires from a newcomer, 
 should not attempt to make any fresh contribution to know- 
 ledge^ but try rather to re-read an old message in the light 
 of recent and current events, appeal to some classic whose 
 name has become a household word, some master-spirit of 
 literature, and ask what he stands for in modern life. What 
 is there about his work that will, in Bacon's phrase, 'come 
 home to our own business and bosom'? What ideals does he 
 set before us? What is the secret of his immortality? 
 
 Such a master-spirit is Vergil, whom to have known and 
 loved is in itself a liberal education; whose voice — after 
 nineteen centuries — has lost nothing of its ancient resonance 
 and perennial charm; whose poems are still an oracle (for 
 that is of course the meaning of the term Sortes Vergilianae) 
 and not only an oracle but a fruitful and inspiring oracle to 
 the community as well as to the individual of to-day. 
 
 ^Dr Postgate. 
 
 ^ My paper is under obv ious obligations, which I gratefully acknow- 
 ledge, in particular to two comparatively recent Studies, — Vergil 
 and Tennyson^ by the President of Magdalen, and Roma Felix, by 
 the Reverend Cyril Martindale. 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 To the genius and the greatness of the spell-binder no 
 testimony is needed. If it were, from among the 'cloud of 
 witnesses' we might be tempted to cite two — Burke for his 
 words and Tennyson for his works and his example. Tenny- 
 son, who has himself been styled our English Vergil ; who 
 was from first to last a worshipper at the shrine; who in his 
 student-days at Cambridge had to be called to order by his 
 teacher (Whewell the logician was the man, and the scene a 
 lecture-room in Trinity) for reading Vergil 'under the 
 rose,' when his mind should have been concentrated on the 
 charms of the syllogism; and who, fifty or sixty years on, 
 after he had written ' by request of the Mantuans ' that Ode 
 to Roman Vergil which we all know (or should know) by 
 heart, with its ' ocean-roll of rhythm ' and its confessio fidei: 
 
 'I salute thee, Mantovano, 
 
 I that loved thee since my day began, 
 
 Wielder of the stateliest measure 
 Ever moulded by the lips of man;' 
 
 — who, I say, long years afterwards, when he was laid to 
 rest in the Abbey, had placed upon his coffin for his own 
 
 'Golden Branch amid the Shadows' 
 
 a wreath of laurel from Vergil's grave. 
 
 This Tennyson should be one witness and the other 
 should be Burke, of whom it is related that he kept always 
 within reach a well-worn copy of Vergil — of Vergil, not one 
 of the ninety-and-nine translations of Vergil; — Burke with 
 his reminder that 'if ever we should find ourselves disposed 
 not to admire those writers and artists — Vergil and Livy, 
 for instance, Raphael and Michael Angelo — whom all the 
 learned had admired, not to follow our own fancies, but to 
 study them until we know how and what we ought to admire : 
 and if we cannot arrive at this union of admiration with 
 knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull than that the 
 rest of the world has been imposed upon.' 
 6 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 Thirty years ago, in the Gallery above the Bodleian at 
 Oxford, was still shewn (I remember) the edition of Vergil 
 in which Charles the First, on his visit to the Library, when 
 persuaded to consult the Sortes Vergilianae, opened at that 
 terrible passage in the Fourth Aeneid^ the curse of Dido on 
 Aeneas, which with extraordinary precision rehearsed and 
 foreshadowed the tragedy of his own fate. The loss of his 
 throne, the separation from his children, the death of Straf- 
 ford, his own lamentable end, — nothing is left out. You re- 
 member the lines and the poignant conclusion : 
 
 'Nee cum se sub leges pacis iniquae 
 Tradiderit, regno aut optata luce fruatur, 
 Sedcadat ante diem mediaque inhumatus harena.' 
 
 Life Is so full of strange and startling coincidences that 
 there is no need for us to hold our breath in wonder at the 
 story, or to see in this curious dispensation mysterious testi- 
 mony to the uncanny power of 'Vergil the sorcerer.' Had 
 the War taught us nothing else, it would at least have taught 
 us once and for all never to forget the hard realities that 
 stand half-concealed and half-revealed behind language — 
 the intimate and indivisible connexion between real litera- 
 ture and real life. 'Literature,' it has been sald,^ 'classical 
 literature, is a rehearsal of the whole drama of life, from the 
 cradle to the grave,' and the adoption from the time of 
 Hadrian ' onwards, that is to say from the beginning of the 
 second century a.d., of Vergil as an oracle was simply and 
 solely the tribute of the Roman world to the range and 
 power of Vergil's works, which may fairly and without 
 exaggeration be characterized as the pagan Bible. 
 
 Ever since the beginning of the Christian era, when from 
 time to time great issues, national or personal, have hung 
 
 '^Aen. iv, 615-21. 
 
 2 Mr T. W. Dunn in The Times Educational Supplement, March, 
 1917. 
 
 ' Spartianus, Hadr. Vita. 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 trembling in the balance, quaking hearts have set anxious 
 fingers turning up in the pages of Holy Writ some text to 
 yield in advance foreknowledge and comfort. That Vergil 
 and perhaps Vergil alone besides the Bible should have been 
 chosen for this purpose is after all only a striking recognition 
 and confirmation of the prestige the poet won and held in 
 the times of momentous crisis at which he lived and wrote, 
 an austere figure, the Maiden of Naples — so his contem- 
 poraries called him — of whom it might be said as it was of 
 Milton, 'the Lady of Christ's,' that 
 
 'His soul was like a star and dwelt apart'; 
 
 a poet whose early work, the Messianic Eclogue,long ran ked 
 with Isaiah as a prophecy, a conscious or unconscious pro- 
 phecy, of the coming of Christ, repeated later in the ' unto 
 aj' of the Hercules myth in y^etteidYIll,^ 
 
 'Attulit et nobis aliquando optantibus aetas 
 Auxilium adventumque dei'; 
 
 whose epic, the Aeneid, was anticipated by Propertius, 
 spokesman of Rome, in the memorable phrase, 'Nescio quid 
 maius nascitur Iliade' — 'a greater than Homer is here'; 
 whose fame as the Evangelist or the Shakespeare of Italy 
 was by the year 79 a. d. so well established not only among 
 the intellectuals, 'the Princes of Parnassus,' but among the 
 rank and file of citizens also, that while Statius^ speaks of 
 him in language of the same devout homage that in later 
 days Milton was to dedicate to the memory of Shakespeare, 
 it was in a half-line of Vergil scratched incomplete upon the 
 wall at his side, that as the shadow and the silence of death 
 descended, in the great eruption of Vesuvius, on Hercula- 
 neum and Pompeii, the Roman sentry, dying at his post, 
 took leave of the world. 
 
 Much, but not too much, has been written and said about 
 the 'natural magic' of Vergil's half-lines, those tiny 'jets' of 
 
 ^Aen. viii, 200 f. 
 1 Theb. xii, 816 sq.; Silv. iv, 4, 53 fF., 7, 25; v, 3, 214. 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 incomparable speech in which, ever and anon, he gives utter- 
 ance to the great thoughts, the 'eternal verities' with which 
 we tend to associate his work; 'his single words and phrases, 
 his pathetic half-lines, with their sad earnestness and vivid 
 exactness, 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.' ^ Sic vos non 
 vobis — of the self-sacrifice in nature ;j/«/ sua cuique dies — 
 'each hath his day appointed, each his deed ' ; dis aliter visum 
 — 'God's ways are not as our ways'; unum pro multis dabitur 
 caput — 'one life in atonement for many.' Some will remem- 
 ber how Mrs Humphry Ward^ has analysed one of these 
 half-lines, the famous sunt lacrimae rerum, the pity that 
 Aeneas found at Carthage for Priam and ' the tale of Troy 
 Divine'; how she shows the 'universality' of the thought, 
 arguing that the tears are tears ' not so much for ' [Priam] 'as 
 for all griefs ! — for this duped, tortured, struggling life of 
 ours — for the mortalia ' (what our liturgy calls 'the changes 
 and chances of this mortal life') 'which grip all hearts, which 
 none escape — pain and separation and remorse, hopes 
 deceived, and promise mocked, decadence in ourselves, 
 change in others and that iron gentleness of death which 
 closes all.' 
 
 Much has been written on these'iacula prudentium'from 
 what I would venture to call the Vergilian Breviary; but 
 perhaps nothing is more significant than the fact that time 
 and again they have been chosen as the tesserae, the watch- 
 words, the mottoes of great schools and great institutions. 
 'One brief hour may yet inspire an aeon, 
 One great thought may still cement an host.' 
 
 Apart from the ' Lest we forget ' of Liverpool's 'Deus nobis 
 haec otia fecit,' there is the motto of Harrow, ' Stet Fortuna 
 
 '^ Newman, Grammar of Assent. The passage cannot be repeated 
 or reproduced too often. 
 
 ^Fenwick's Career, cap. x init. Marie Antoinette stands for Priam 
 in her context. 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 Domus! ' The prosperity of the House — may it always be 
 our bulwark! The motto of the Clan Macmillan, 'Miseris 
 succurrere disco,' My task — the succour of the oppressed.^ 
 The motto of the old Bath College, ' Possunt,quia posse vi- 
 dentur.'They can, — because they think they can. The motto 
 of Clifton College, Earl Haig's old school — 'Spiritus intus 
 alit,' 'the soul of the place — the life-blood- of us all.' The 
 creative word — the master phrase — thesoulofacommunity. 
 'C'est Time qui gagne la bataille,' writes Marshal Foch. If 
 he is right (and surely he is), how many battles has not 
 Vergil won! 
 
 These four instances taken at random may serveto clinch 
 the point. More recent and perhaps more striking is the re- 
 cognition in the name and style of our national Order of 
 Merit — one of theproudesttributesthenationhas to bestow 
 for service and self-sacrifice — the recognition I say of the 
 master mind of Vergil, who in a central saying in the Aeneid 
 bestows the palm in Elysium on those souls who by service, 
 by Merit (English hasborrowedeventheword),haveearned 
 renown and made men 'keep their memory green' : 
 
 'Quique sui memores aliquos fecere merendo."^ 
 
 Striking sortes or oracles in the strict sense of the word 
 might easily be multiplied from many sources. The speaker 
 would prefer to give two or three from his own personal ex- 
 perience. — In August 1914, in the week of the German rush 
 for Paris, when von Kluck was trying desperately to 'hack 
 his way through' ; when day by day in the 'times diagram the 
 black line of the hostile advance was slipping nearer and 
 nearer to its objective; when all were anxious and in some 
 quarters it was thought that the fall of Paris was only a 
 matter of days; — a scholar turned, not unnaturally, to his 
 Vergil for light. What said the Oracle } The sors was from the 
 Sixth Aeneid, and the words ran thus : 
 
 ^Edgar's phrase in Lear — 'Pregnant to good pity.' 
 '^Aen. vi, 664. 
 
 ID 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 'Quos super atra silex iam iam lapsura cadentique 
 Imminet assimilis. Lucent genialibus altis 
 Aurea fulcra toris epulaeque ante ora paratae 
 Regifico luxu ' 
 
 (There you have the lure — and the menace. Then the sors 
 and consolation) 
 
 ^Furiarum maxima iuxta 
 Accuhat et manibus prohibet contingere mensas. '^ 
 
 The Queen of the Avengers keeps guard between. Her 
 hand thrusts away the spoiler from the feast. What modern 
 pen could have portrayed with the same terseness and power 
 that tremendous and heart-shaking crisis } That the words 
 turned up at random thus are a reminiscence or echo of the 
 passage in Pindar,* 
 
 Ittejotj tov iirep K£(pa\ag 
 
 ys TtavToXov XiOov wapa tiq srpeipEv afifu deoc, 
 
 aroXfiarov ''EWaSi p.6-)(6ov, 
 
 which compares the Persian invasion of Greece to the stone 
 of Tantalus, — ever threatening avalanche-like to fall but 
 never quite 'crashing' or crushing its objective — seems on 
 reflection only to give further pregnancy and point to the 
 sors Vergiliana. 
 
 A year passed and one atom, a 'classical' atom, 'in the 
 sounding labour-house vast' of aLondon vexed andharassed 
 with the unsolicited attentions, nightly renewed, of the ubi- 
 quitous and objectionable Zeppelin, turned yet again to 
 Vergil for comfort. And pat fell not the bomb but the ano- 
 dyne. The sors was from Aeneid IX, the description of the 
 the wolf, 'the prowling wolf,' — so Milton^, — 
 
 ^y/^w.vi, 602-606. TheopeningwordsrecallTennyson's^eT;^«^^: 
 'But while now the great San Philip hung above us like a cloud, 
 Whence the thunderbolt shall fall long and loud ' : and the last two 
 verses are staged by Shakespeare in the Tempest, Act iii, scene 3. 
 
 ^Isthmian Odes, vii (viii), 9 S. 'Inasmuch as some God hath put 
 away from us the Tantalos-stone that hung above our heads, a curse 
 intolerable to Hellas.' — Ernest Myers. ^P.L., iv, 1 83 ff. 
 
 II 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 ' Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey 
 Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve, 
 In hurdled cotes amid the field secure "... 
 
 Yes, but whereas Milton's wolf 
 
 'Leaps o'er the fence with ease into the fold,' 
 
 in VergiP the beast would prey but the flock 'take covert ' 
 and the raider is foiled. 
 
 'Ac veluti pleno lupus insidiatus ovili 
 Cum fremit ad caulas, ventos perpessus et imbris, 
 Nocte super media, tuti sub matribus agni 
 Balatum exercent : ille asper et improbus ira 
 
 S^VIT IN ABSENTIS' 
 
 '■s^evit in absentisF voids his spleen (his ' frightfulness ') in 
 vain on a foe beyond his reach . . . 
 
 ' Poets that lasting marble seek 
 Must carve in Latin or in Greek ' . . . 
 
 Ransack all literature and will you find in any language 
 another three words to sum up so vividly and completely 
 the Zeppelin off^ensive, its character and its result? 
 
 Curiously apt was a third son on the attempt to force the 
 Dardanelles, a line from AeneidVK^ with the neighbouring 
 reference to the four 'capital ships ' Aeneas lost, the set-back 
 to his hopes and the joyless reflection: 'Hie primum For- 
 tuna fidem mutata novavit ' ; and a fourth on the Czar and 
 the Revolution in Russia, the lines on the fall of Priam in 
 Aeneidll} 
 
 ' lacet ingens litore truncus 
 Avolsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus': 
 
 ' But yesterday the word of Caesar might 
 
 Have stood against the world: now lies he there, 
 
 And none so poor to do him reverence ' ; 
 
 ^Aen. ix, 59 sq. 
 ^v^^«. V, 604 and 639. ^Jen.ii, $$jf. 
 
 12 
 
SORTES VERGILIANAE 
 
 and the late yet fateful assurance, in 1 9 1 8, of the collapse of 
 Bulgaria and the beginning of the end : 
 
 ' Via prima salutis 
 (Quod minime reris) Graia pandetur ab urbe,'^ 
 
 the highroad to safety, the gate to peace, little though you 
 think it, an enemy city shall first unbar. 
 
 But the War had begun on a Vergilian note, with a sors 
 /^(?r§-i7M«i? spontaneously chosen and taken up with a zest by 
 the nation as a whole. Who does not remember the burden 
 of the song with which the light-hearted Incorrigibles em- 
 barked on the quest.'' 
 
 ' It's a long, long way to Tipperary : 
 It's a long way to go. ' 
 
 And what Latinist who loves his Vergil did not recognise 
 on the instant an almost word-for-word translation of the 
 counsel given by Helenus^ to Aeneas when he thought, 
 'good easy man,' he too at the beginning of his great war, 
 that on the threshold of the adventure stood success.? 
 
 ' Principio Italiam 
 
 [Italy, Hesperia, the Westland was his Tipperary] 
 
 quam tu iam rere propinquam 
 (Vicinosque, ignare, paras invadere portus) 
 
 LONGA PROCVL LONGIS VIA DIVIDIT INVIA TERRIs'; 
 
 'Tipperary' or 'Paradise Won' (some may stumble at the 
 word but 'Paradise' it is, and Paradise not lost, but won). 
 That is the burden of the Aeneid. All life is to Vergil a quest, 
 an adventure, a crusade; a struggle against odds and a hard 
 struggle: but a struggle worth winning. What has he to tell 
 us of the quest .'' What of its aim and its significance.'' Why 
 are these sortes Vergilianae not a 'back number' but a 'live 
 wire,' 'a priceless asset' } 
 
 The answer is to be sought and found in Vergil's Life and 
 Times, as interpreted and embodied in his poetry; in the 
 parallel between those days and these. 
 
 ^Aen. vi, 96 f. '''Aen. iii, 381 fF. 
 
 13 
 
SORTES VERGILIANAE 
 
 Matthew Arnold, whom, no less than his brother-in-arms, 
 Arthur Hugh Clough, we may fairly claim as a Liverpool 
 poet, a Vergilian through-and-through, whose Rugby Chapel 
 is an Anglo-Saxon Aeneid in epitome — IVI atthew Arnold once 
 said, we are told, that his poems were 'a cry of pain.' Mrs 
 Sellar in her Reminiscences relates that Burns wrote his great 
 song of liberty, ' Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled,' in a fierce 
 thunderstorm battling with the tempest on the road to 
 Newton-Stewart, near Loch Ken. So, too, Vergil's music 
 was wrung from him by a storm, a storm not of Nature but 
 of State. It is a common-place of the textbooks that 'Poetry 
 is a criticism and an interpretation of life,' not of Greek life 
 or of Roman life or of English life, but of life — the life of 
 the race; and not for one generation only but for all time 
 (that is what they mean when they call the Classics the Hu- 
 manities). If we may add that each poet who matters and 
 Vergil among the rest brings something of his own into the 
 common stock, we might make bold to say that Vergil's 
 special contribution to the ipavog is a robust idealism. His 
 theme is the service of man. His ideal is success, cost 
 what it may, in that service. Of the two lines^ in which, 
 according to tradition, Vergil ' unlocked his heart,' one is the 
 sors which Apollo by the mouth of the Sibyl gives to Aeneas 
 (and through Aeneas to Rome and to us) in the temple of 
 Cumae at the climax of his pilgrimage: 'Tu ne cede malis, 
 sed contra audentior ito! ' 'Do not you go down before mis- 
 fortune ! the harder Fate hits, the more daring be your on- 
 set! ' That is the mainspring of his story and his ethics. Iron 
 endurance — indomitable pluck. It is one of Lord Fisher's 
 three 'nevers' (Never argue. Never apologise. Never give 
 in). It is the 'Vaincre. Vaincre — n'importe a quel prix. 
 Vaincre, non pour dominer mais pour 6tre libre' of that 
 redoubtable Vergilian, Marshal Foch, tempered all through 
 by a ' passion for perfection ' — the ' divine despair ' or divine 
 discontent, that is for ever (like the souls in the underworld 
 ^Aen. V, 710; vi, 95. 
 14 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 whom Aeneas saw waiting and wearying for their entry into 
 rest)stretchingouthandsofpassionatelongingforthefurther 
 shore: 'Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.'^ That 
 is the pith and marrow of Vergil's teaching to the New Age; 
 his rule for Peace as well as for War, for all life and for every 
 man. It is the sors Vergiliana par excellence. It is the Pauline 
 note, iTriKTHvofiivoQ. It explains the beautiful old legend 
 how Saint Paul on his way to Rome touched at Naples and 
 when told Vergil's story and taken to see Vergil's grave 
 recognized in the poet a kindred spirit and wept that he 
 had come too late to baptize him as a convert to the true 
 religion. 
 
 More than most men, Vergil in his generation had 'learnt 
 in suffering what he taught in song.' His worldwas the world 
 that immediately preceded the Christian era; a world groan- 
 ing and travailing with a new birth ; faint from the period of 
 gestation ; sick with long years of war at home and abroad; 
 fresh from the fight for existence against Antony and the 
 East; out of which — the last Act in the great drama of the 
 Republic — was to emerge, so men thought, a colossal trans- 
 formation scene. The cycle of war and tribulation was over. 
 The cycle of peace and progress was to come. 
 
 'The world's great age begins anew. 
 The golden years return.' 
 
 The air was on fire with talk of a Deliverer, and that 
 promised Deliverer none other than the Victor of Actium, 
 the Saviour of Rome, the young Augustus. 
 
 'Hie vir, hie est tibi quern promitti saepius audis, 
 Augustus Caesar, divi genus, aurea condet 
 Saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arva 
 Saturno quondam'. . .^ 
 
 And here comes in a personal touch ; for, unless recent 
 speculation and research are at fault, this Deliverer was not 
 ^Aen. vi, 314. ^Jen. vi, 791 ff. 
 
 15 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 only (as we knew before) the friend but the old friend — 
 almost the 'school friend' — of the poet.^ 
 
 Vergil's childhood, boyhood and youth had felt the stress 
 and the strain. His manhood caught up and passed on the 
 new hope, the 'Sibylline' promise that here at last was the 
 'peace, unity and concord' prophesied by the seers of the 
 past. To him, however, it is to be a spiritual regeneration ; it 
 is less the surroundings than the men who are to be trans- 
 figured; and so Instead of propounding his faith in terms of 
 politics and fact,hewrapstruthinfiction^tospreadasalegend 
 and a vision through the medium of his poetry. 
 
 The blossoms of the Eclogues, his first garland of song, are 
 grouped round one poem, the immortal rose of childhood, 
 the Messianic Eclogue, the central figure of which Is the 
 figure of a new-born babe, a laughing babe, brought to the 
 birth by the travail of the whole world, and destined to lead 
 that world on into the land of promise. The message is 
 transmitted in a language and a similitude that must strike 
 home to every heart. 
 
 In the Georgics and the Aeneid, the achievements of his 
 prime, — at their face value no more than a treatise on farm- 
 ing and a conventional epic, — he sings _;?n/ the Reconstruc- 
 tion of Italy, the old agricultural Italy,' Saturnlan' Italy — ^In 
 its connotation not unlike the 'merrie' England of the Eliza- 
 bethans — and then the re-birth and re-constitutlon of the 
 State — ex Troia Roma; ^llion falling, Rome arising.' In the 
 Fourth Gfor^ic (his' fable ofthe Bees') the community, in the 
 Aeneid the individual, the good citizen personified, the 'Un- 
 known Warrior,' is the hero of the piece. It is an epic of 
 'God's best gift to man' — an epic of the Day's Work. 
 
 Not for nothing is Honvs, the old Latin word for 
 ' burden,' so closely bound up with Honos, the Latin word 
 for 'honour,' 'preferment,' that Latin writers play on the 
 
 1 Class. Rev. i8, 1 19-122. Note on the Culex by Dr Warde 
 Fowler, with aP.s. by ' R.S.C 
 
 ^ 'Obscuris vera involvens.' — Jen. vi, init. 
 
 16 
 
SORTES VERGIL lANAE 
 
 resemblance, in the spirit of the modern motto, Onerari est 
 honorari} On Rome's oldest and most cherished monuments 
 of the past,the Tombs of the Scipios,we read therecord only 
 of offices served and burdens borne: — 'Consol, censor, 
 aedilis hie fuit apud vos.' No vain flourish of rhetoric there; 
 only the facts, — 'facta non verba.' 'L'homme c'est rien — 
 I'oeuvre c'est tout.' 
 
 The Pilgrim whose Progress is recounted in the Aeneid, 
 the 'traveller between life and death 'whose career is held up 
 to all as a pattern and an example, bearing on his shoulders 
 — not in a mere metaphor, for the prophetic story is outlined 
 on his shield — the doom and destiny of his descendants : 
 'AttoUensumero famamqueet fata nepotum'^ — is nominally 
 Aeneas, but, just as England, in the words of the old criti- 
 cism, is the heroine of the historical plays of Shakespeare, 
 so, it has been said, 'the hero of the Aeneid is Rome,' Roma 
 aeterfta,the daughter of Troy and heir to Troy's great record, 
 with roots striking deep into the past and branches reaching 
 out far into the future. The soul of Troy survives in Aeneas 
 and his company. '1 am sure I can save this country, and no- 
 body else can,' said Pitt at a crisis of the Napoleonic Wars, — 
 potest, — quia posse videtur. And similarly Aeneas — 'data fata 
 secutus'^ — secure in the star of his house, the halo that while 
 Troy was burning hovered over the head of his son Ascanius 
 — Aeneas, listening to the voice of promise as Joan of Arc 
 (5«/«/^Joan) to her 'voices,' sets out on his pilgrimage, an 
 austere pilgrimage, 
 
 'To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield,' 
 
 a conscript, and a conscript for life, but with faith in his mis- 
 sion and in himself; a Hamlet, but a Hamlet not unequal to 
 his task. And in this spirit of complete self-subordination, 
 to heaven, to country and to family, he finds if not happiness 
 ^cf. e.c. Liv. xxii, 30, 'Plebiscitum, quo oneratus magis quam 
 honoratus sum, primus antique abrogoque.' 
 
 ^^««. viii, 731. 'y/^«. 1,382. 
 
 17 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 at least content. His philosophy is thephilosophy of Horace 
 and of Hastings, ' a mind that, happen what may, never loses 
 poise or balance' — ' Mens aequa in arduis. ' Like Richard the 
 Second in the play he says in effect 
 
 'I am sworn brother, sweet. 
 To grim necessity ' 
 ' Italiam non sponte sequor.' 
 Here is no epic of Free- Will. The call is on him — he can 
 no other — to follow up, to push his stone, to turn his wheel, 
 but notlike Sisyphus and Ixion in vain. He is a type and a 
 model for Rome and for Augustus in the days of Recon- 
 struction : 
 
 ' [His] shoulders held the sky suspended; 
 [He] stood, and [Troy's] foundations stay.' 
 You remember the great prologue: how he came, 'Fate's 
 refugee,' to Italy and the Lavinian fields, after sore buffeting 
 at the decree of Heaven, from years of suffering on sea and 
 land, in peace and war — 
 
 'dum conderet urbem 
 Inferretque deos Latio' 
 
 — so he might but found his city and bring the worship of 
 his gods to Latium. Yes, and he achieved the task. A super- 
 Orpheus, he never looked back. 
 
 This idea of the service of man — 'many men through many 
 years each working in his own country' — the theme of the 
 Aeneid^ the call of the Race, is as old as humanity itself. It is 
 the Labours of Hercules the Pathfinder. It is the Agony of 
 Prometheus the Martyr — matched, each of them, against 
 the enemy of man and of human progress in that duel, that 
 eternal duel, between the forces of Good and Evil, which 
 began in the Garden of Eden and will end only with the Last 
 Trump. It is an Act, and an essential Act, in the Tragedy 
 of Evolution. The Juno of the Aeneid is the Zeus of the 
 Prometheus Vinctus and the Hera of the Hercules myth. Pro- 
 meiheus and Hercules come alive in Aeneas of Troy, who 
 
SORTES VERGILIANAE 
 
 like them dares the great ordeal and goes down, quick, into 
 the Underworld, to help and to redeem the people of whom 
 he is the shepherd. 'It was for the people' — says the hero of 
 'The Knife and the Naked Chalk' — 'the sheep are the people.' 
 ... 'It was not right that The Beast should master man. 
 What else could I have donef But this time the story is re-told 
 in the image of man as a unit, a loyal unit, in a typical family 
 (and the family was itself the unit of Roman life throughout 
 Rome's history) in migration and transition from Troy of the 
 past, which typifies, dimly, the old regime broken up and 
 abandoned after Actium, the 'great war' of the day,to Rome 
 of the present and the future, Roma aeterna, to Rome and 
 Italy, the landof promise ('debitatellus'), which the Pilgrims 
 had set out to seek and which the new era is to see inaugur- 
 ated, — the State which it is the destiny of Aeneas, ashadowy 
 Augustus,to found and enthrone as queen of the world; the 
 goal of the adventure, the ark of civilization; to be handed 
 down by dint of Tennyson's 
 
 'Something higher, something nobler, all for each 
 and each for all,' 
 
 secure from generation to generation, like the Luck of the 
 House in the Commonwealth of the Bees: 
 
 ' Ergo ipsas quamvis angusti terminus aevi 
 Excipiat (neque enim plus septima ducitur aestas), 
 At genus immortale manet, multosque per annos 
 Stat Fortuna domus, et avi numerantur avorum';^ 
 
 'Therefore, though each a life of narrow span. 
 Ne'er stretched to summers more than seven, befalls. 
 Yet deathless doth the race endure, and still 
 Perennial stands the fortune of their line. 
 From grandsire unto grandsire backward told';^ 
 
 ^G. iv, 206-209, perhaps the finest lines in a magnificent passage 
 (149-228), which yet deserves the closest study as a whole. 
 ^ Mr James Rhoades. 
 
 19 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 'For so the ark be brought to Zion, who 
 Heeds how they perished or were paid, who bore it? 
 For so the shrine abide, what shame — what pride — 
 If [they] the priests,were bound or crowned before it?'^ 
 
 Vergil's religion, if we are to take his own word or indi- 
 cation for it, is the religion of Pythagoras, with the old belief 
 in the cycle of time, which at every turn of the wheel brings 
 back to earth fresh souls from the past, to carry on the govern- 
 ment and advancement of the race, 'souls ascending and 
 descending the ladder' according as they do well or ill from 
 generation to generation, 'the men who help and the men 
 who hinder,' some mounting from strength to strength, 
 others dropping ever downwards, lower and lower, if they 
 fail themselves and their country. ' J ust and sure is the wheel, 
 swerving not a hair' : the struggle is always against odds, 
 always failing of complete success, and yet, as often, de- 
 sperately and perforce renewed, with the old ideal still to 
 lead us 'on, and always on.' Here is an ipavog, a love- 
 feast, to which each feeblest member of the community 
 brings, in the spirit of Aeneas and of the Bees, his particle 
 of service and self-sacrifice, struggling on, 'faint yet pur- 
 suing,' 'n'importe a quel prix,' 'non sibi sedtoti,' towards 
 the common goal. 
 
 What but struggle is the heart of the allegory and of life.? 
 What else was the hall-mark of Rome.'' 
 
 ' Sic fortis Etruria crevit, 
 Scilicet et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma.'^ 
 
 Clearly to Vergil, as to Marcus Aurelius, 'life was more of 
 a wrestling match than a dance.' The farmer and his bulls 
 on the land, pitted against nature and the powers of nature. 
 The bees in the hive contending against drones and vam- 
 pires. Aeneas and his men on pilgrimage to found their city 
 in defiance of Juno and her Acheron ; ' and for each his sors 
 
 ^ Mr Kipling, 'The Proconsuls'; Times, 22 July 1905. 
 ^G.ii, 533f. ^Jen.vii,2ii. 
 
 20 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 in that vital and essential co-operation, which Vergil is out 
 to preach and to promote. 'Toil,' he says, 'unconscionable 
 toil,' ^ is the real world-conqueror. It needs shortage and 
 stress to speed up the machine: 
 
 'Labor omnia vincit 
 Improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas.' 
 
 And again 
 
 '■Depresso incipiat iam turn mihi taurus aratro 
 Ifigemere, et sulco attritus splendescere vomer.' ^ 
 'The ox is yoked and he must plough,' as Napoleon told his 
 doctors when they ordered him a 'rest-cure' on campaign. 
 Yes, plough (says Vergil) till the plough-share shines like 
 silver in the furrow. To Aeneas it is the 'follow up! ' of the 
 Harrow song: 
 
 ' Perge modo et, quate ducit via, dirigegressum.'^ 
 
 ' Vade age et ingentem factis fer ad aethera Troiam;'* 
 
 and, in an aside, by the way, for the 'idle rich ' and the 'ca' 
 canny ' labourer is the pillory and the stocks of their sors 
 also. They are the 'barren darnel' and the 'wild oats' that 
 spring up in the fields untilled and lord it, play the tyrant, 
 domineer over the realms of golden opportunity: 
 
 'Interque nitentiaculta 
 
 Infelixloliumet steriks dominantura.vena.e.' 
 The chief praise istothe Bees in his 'Fable of the Bees,'who 
 always (he tells us) rise to the height of a great emergency, 
 and when the need is sternest and the community hardest 
 hit by loss and devastation 'toil, and toil terribly,' with 
 cumulative eifort and collective conscience — with the 'di- 
 versity of gifts' and the 'unity of spirit' which our Navy 
 League after their example has taken for its motto — 'toil, 
 and toil terribly,' till the loss is made good: 
 
 ' Quo magis exhaustae fuerint, hoc acrius omnes 
 
 Incumbent generis lapsi sarcire ruinas, 
 
 Complebuntque foros et floribus horrea texent.^' 
 
 I'wicked' toil. G.i, 145 f. ^G. i, 145. '^^«. {,401. 
 
 *Jen. iii, 46 1 . ^ G. i v, 1 40 ff. 
 
 21 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 ' The more impoverished they, the keenlier all 
 To mend the fallen fortunes of their race, 
 Will nerve them, fill the cells up, tier on tier, 
 And weave their granaries from the rifled flowers.'^ 
 
 No 'ca' canny,' no 'sinn fein' there; all are to 'get busy' 
 and do their duty, not for themselves alone but for the race. 
 For life, the poet reminds us, never stands still. It is like a 
 river, on which we are all compelled to row; a river with a 
 fierce current, that it taxes every muscle to master. Delay 
 and interruption spell ruin and disaster: 
 
 ' Sic omnia fatis 
 In peius ruere ac retro sublapsa referri, 
 Non aliter quam qui adverso vix flumine lembum 
 Remigiis subigit, si bracchia forte remisit 
 Atque ilium in praeceps prono rapit alveus amni.'^ 
 
 ' Never will [man] be his own master, nor yet ever any man's. 
 Hewill get half he gives, and givetwicewhat he gets, till his 
 life's last breath ; and if he lays aside his load before he draws 
 that last breath, all his work will go for naught.'' There, in 
 the words of a great modern writer, is life according to 
 Vergil; and there, surely, is an ' oracle ' for to-day. 
 
 The ideas and qualities which Vergil throws upon the 
 screen in the shifting pageant of his great epic are elemental 
 ideas and qualities, the things that matter in the life of the 
 individual and of the community — continuity, courage, 
 patriotism, persistency, tradition ; the splendid heroism and 
 self-sacrifice of youth, of a Pallas,a Lausus, a Euryalus; the 
 iron determination and inflexible principles of manhood 
 and age, of an Aeneas, a Tarchon,an Evander. He is too wise 
 to pretend that the yearnings and aspirations he conjures 
 up can ever find their full fruition here and now. 
 
 That passion which possesses only thegreat masters of Art 
 and of Science, the passion for perfection, which led Vergil 
 
 ^Mr James Rhoades. ^G. 1,199 ff. 
 
 ' Mr Kipling, Rewards and Fairies. 
 
 22 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 himself as he lay dying to bid his friends burn the Aeneid, 
 and Lord Kelvin, a kindred spirit, at the end of his career 
 to characterize his own life-work as failure,^ that passion 
 glows and vibrates in the characters as well as in the har- 
 monies of the poem : 
 
 ' Aut pugnam aut aliquid iamdudum invadere magnum, 
 Mens agitat mihi, nee placida contenta quiete est.'^ 
 
 But if hope inspired the Fourth £f/o^af with its anticipation 
 of the 'Madonna and Child' of Raphael and his great con- 
 temporaries, with all that symbolism of dawn and spring, a 
 re-incarnation, a new age, 
 
 'The soul that rises with us, our life's star,' 
 
 yet the Aeneid ends with the passing of a heroic soul, a rebel 
 soul it is true but a heroic soul, still aspiring, still unsatisfied, 
 with a sigh, cum gemitu, to the hereafter: 
 
 'And with a moan his spirit passed, disdainful, to 
 the shades':^ 
 
 ends with the admission that for Everyman the quest is 
 (and must be) the reward. 
 
 The triumph of Aeneas is for the moment eclipsed by the 
 tragedy of Turnus. 'It isn't life that matters,' he seems to 
 say, with Age and Experience, in Mr Walpole's Fortitude, 
 'it is the courage that you bring to it.' Throughout we are 
 struggling on towards a goal that eludes and must elude us 
 still; 'fugientis prendimus oras Italiae'; a radiance, an ideal; 
 
 ^'One word characterises the most strenuous of the efforts for the 
 advancement of science that I have made perseveringly for fifty-five 
 years: that word is failure. I know no more of electric and magnetic 
 force, or of the relation between ether, electricity and ponderable 
 matter, or of chemical affinity, than I knew or tried to teach my class- 
 students in my first session as Professor.' 
 
 Lord Kelvin at his Jubilee (Glasgow, I 896 j. 
 Uen.\x,i?,i>i. 
 ^Aen. xii, 95 1 ; the translation is Mr Garrod's. 
 
 23 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 'The light that never was on sea or land, 
 The consecration and the poet's dream ;' 
 
 'Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum 
 Tendimus in Latium'; — 
 
 ' On, to the bound of the waste. 
 On to the City of God.' 
 
 That in feeble outline is the teaching of Vergil ; what Mr 
 H. G. Wells and the author oi Erewhon contemptuously 
 dismiss, the one as'Tennysonianism'and the other as 'mere 
 Rococo,' but what led Bacon to describe Vergil as 'the 
 chastest poet and the royalest that to the memory of man is 
 knownj'and the elder Scaliger, as cited by Sir Philip Sidney, 
 to declare that ' no Philosopher's precepts can sooner make 
 you an honest man than the reading of Virgil.' 'Great words 
 in the memory furnish' (it has been said) 'one of the best 
 hopes for great aspirations in life. ' Happy the man who goes 
 through life with sortes Vergilianae ringing in his mind, eter- 
 nal verities in immortal verse. They will be to him so many 
 talismans against the deadly and devastating materialism, 
 which seems to be settling, like a blight, on the world of 
 to-day. 
 
 Many will recall a passage of Robert Louis Stevenson in 
 the first chapter of ne Ebb Tide, the passage about Robert 
 Herrick the beach-comber and his 'tattered Vergil.' 'Cer- 
 tainly,' writes Stevenson, 'if money could have been raised 
 upon the book, Robert Herrick would long ago have sacrifi- 
 ced that last possession; but the demand for literature which 
 is so marked a feature in some parts of the South Seas, ex- 
 tends not so far as the dead tongues, and the Vergil which he 
 could not exchange against a meal had often consoled him in 
 his hunger. He would study it, as he lay with tightened belt 
 on the floor of the old calaboose, seeking favourite passages 
 and finding new ones only less beautiful because they lacked 
 the consecration of remembrance. Or he would pause on 
 
 ^Aen. i, 204 f. 
 24 
 
SORTES VERGILIANAE 
 
 random country walks, sit on the path-side, gazing over the 
 sea on the mountains of Eimeo, and dip into the^eneid seek- 
 ingsortes. And if the oracle (asisthe way with oracles) replied 
 with no very certain nor encouraging voice, visions of Eng- 
 land at least would throng upon the exile's memory: the 
 busy schoolroom, the green playing fields, holidays at home, 
 and the perennial roar of London, and the fireside and the 
 white head of his father. For it is the destiny of those grave, 
 restrained and classic writers, with whom we make enforced 
 and often painful acquaintanceship at school, to pass into the 
 blood and become native in the memory; so that a phrase of 
 Vergil speaks not so much of Mantua or Augustus, but of 
 English places and the student's own irrevocable youth.' ' 
 
 Many hues are blended to make up this raii*bow fascina- 
 tion — grit, faith, earnestness, loyalty, discipline, the spirit 
 and the star of Rome, embodied long before Vergil's time in 
 the work of his spiritual progenitor, the fighting poet 
 Ennius, with his unconquerable soul; the 
 
 'Qui vicit, non est victor nisi victu' fatetur' 
 of the struggle against Hannibal, and the 
 
 ' Quae neque Dardaniis campis potuere perire, 
 Nee cum capta capi nee cum combusta cremari ' 
 which spells the passing of Troy — the coming of Rome. 
 
 But the predominating idea is the continuity of service, the 
 call of the race. The individual dies, but the state, of which 
 he is'just as much a part as his soul (according to Vergil and 
 the Stoics) is an atom or element in the great world-soul, 
 the Anima mundi — the state persists, 
 
 ' Moribus antiquis stat Res Romana virisque.' 
 The valour of the past — the mainstay of the present. 
 'Serit arbores quae alteri saeclo prosint,' wrote the old 
 
 ^Mr Sidney Irwin in his Clifton College Addresses has already cited 
 the words in this connexion, but they will bear repetition : Si? icai 
 
 TOIQ TO. KoXa! 
 
 25 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 poet, and out of the phrase springs Vergil's memorable 
 adaptation, 
 
 INSERE DAPHNI PIROS CARPENT TVA POMA NEPOTES 
 
 'Graft, friend, the fruit tree on the wild, your sons 'sons then 
 will eat fruit of your giving.' That is the call — that is the 
 clue. 
 
 'Westward Ho!' is the slogan ohhe Aeneid,^ and the spirit 
 of Vergil seems still to be 'stepping westward.' (i) It was an 
 American — Walt Whitman — who was the first modern poet 
 to take (like Vergil) as the central spring and inspiration of 
 hispoetry the glory and praise of the day's work. It is an 
 American who in ^e American Era returns, in prose, to the 
 same theme to-day. Here is a characteristic extract. 'Work- 
 ing is living,' writes Mr Powers, 'just as much as play. To 
 a man who is half a man it is a great deal more so. I know 
 work in all its main varieties, and I know that it is God's best 
 gift to man. No one could rob me so grievously as he who 
 took away my work. No punishment would be so horrible to 
 me as to compel me to spend my time seeking amusement;' 
 and so on to the same effect. That is Aeneas all over. (2) And 
 only last Saturday in The Spectator,^ heralded by a fanfare of 
 editorial trumpets, appeared an ecstatic paean or song for 
 American children by the American poet, Mr Vachel Lind- 
 say, — whose visit to Liverpool last winteris still fresh in our 
 memory, — a song to the Daphnis of America, 'Johnny Ap- 
 pleseed,' the Pioneer, who inthe van ofthe migration over the 
 Appalachians westward 'in the twenties, thirties and forties 
 of last century ' went — ' a sort of Rowland of the Wild West,' 
 says 'The Spectator — as if in literal obedience to the call of 
 Vergil, ' singing his songs and planting his apple-orchards, 
 that those who followed him might enjoy the kindly fruits 
 ofthe earth in due season.' No one who cares to see how a 
 sors Vergiliana may germinate and fructify should miss this 
 
 '^Ecl. ix, 50. "^Aen. ii, 781 alibi. 
 
 ^ No. 4,847, pp. 65 I f. 2 1 , May l 92 1 ; q.v. 
 
 26 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 remarkable poem. America has ways of her own in poetry as 
 in life: but, we all know, she 'gets there'; she 'delivers the 
 goods ' ! Here are a few lines to show how Mr Lindsay brings 
 out the symbolism of the fruit. The apple-harvest has come. 
 . . . 'An angel in each apple, 
 
 Great high-schools in each apple, 
 
 Great colleges in each apple, 
 
 American farms in each apple, 
 
 A state-capital in each apple 
 
 That touched the forest-mould. 
 
 Like scrolls and like bolts of silk 
 
 He saw the fruits unfold. 
 
 And the boughs bent down with their alchemy.' 
 
 Old standards in new latitudes: — so the great crusade 
 goes forward. And the crusader never dies; the life-work of 
 the man is moulded by some mysterious alchemy into the 
 fabric of the community. His spirit becomes incorporate in 
 the spirit of the race. So too, as in the teaching of Pythagoras 
 and the folk-lore of many nations, the very soul, it may be, 
 or souls of the past, the hero or the band of heroes (an Arthur 
 or a Romulus; the great Twin Brethren at the Battle of 
 Lake Regillus ; the men of Agincourt in the Retreat from 
 Mons) stream back at the appointed time from exile and 
 purgation across the River of Lethe into the to-day — 
 is it in real presence or by the spiritual standard they have 
 set!* — to the rescue of their sons' sons in the hour of need. 
 
 'They come transfigured back 
 Secure from change in their high-hearted ways. 
 Beautiful evermore, and with the rays 
 Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation.' 
 
 Stat Fortuna domus; — the soul of the Nation, the com- 
 munion of citizens, the spirit of the people, to which all con- 
 tribute for good or for evil, infinitesimally and yet appre- 
 ciably, one and all. The heirloom this and the crown of 
 service, the Roma Dea,the Fortuna Urbis; national character, 
 
 27 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 national tradition, national enthusiasm; a power to move 
 mountains and belonging to all; a great flood to which each 
 puniest wavelet adds nevertheless despite its weakness a 
 momentum of its own; 
 
 ' For though the tired waves vainly breaking 
 Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
 Far back through creeks and inlets making 
 Comes silent, flooding in, the main.' 
 
 Behind the great leader, the 
 
 'Trotus Aeneas pietate insignis et armis,'^ 
 [Aeneas] ' both for piety renowned 
 And puissant deeds,' ^ 
 
 stand arrayed the Unknown Warriors, the 
 
 ' Multi praeterea quos fama obscura recondit ;' ' 
 
 ' Not the great nor well-bespoke. 
 But the mere uncounted folk. 
 Of whose life and death is none. 
 Report or lamentation' ; 
 
 linked and bound, each to each, by good work andgood will, 
 together into one irresistible fellowship of heart and hand, 
 self-sacrifice and mutual service, running, like the tide, a 
 disciplined course, year in year out, from generation to 
 generation, under the lodestar of a great ideal: 
 
 TENDEBANTQVE MANVS RIPAE VLTERIORIS AMORE. 
 
 When Odysseus in his wanderings holds converse with 
 the dead in the underworld, among the souls of the men 
 'killed in action' before Troy, he sees (you remember) the 
 soul of the great Achilles, sick at heart from durance below 
 and eager to exchange his sceptre in the shades for the sickle 
 or the spade of a day-labourer on earth. What is his con- 
 solation.? He asks for tidings of the New Age, for tidings of 
 his son: and when Odysseus tells him that Neoptolemus has 
 'y^^«. vi, 403. ^Milton, P.Z,. xii, 321. ^v^^«. v, 302. 
 28 
 
SORTESVERGILIANAE 
 
 played the man and has done his day's work well, he is com- 
 forted. There you have the Vergilian cry, the watchword of 
 Age to Age: — 'Carry on!' 'Speak to the people of Israel 
 that they go forward,' 'on and always on!' so that the souls 
 ofthemen'over there' (as the Greeks put it), the men to 
 whom we owe life and liberty, as they lie in the domes of 
 silence, may hear presently the watchman's cry, 'All 's well 
 with the race,' and knowing that their sacrifice has not been 
 in vain, may move like the shade of the great Achilles, re- 
 joicing down the meadow of asphodel: 
 
 a»C f(j>afiriv, '^v)(rj §£ iroorijicEOC AlaKioao 
 (poira fiaKpa (iifiaaa kut aafoSsXov Xsifiiova 
 yqOocrvvr], 6 ol v'tov £^»)v apioHKiTov ilvai.^ 
 
 ^Odyssey, xi, 538 fF. 
 
 29 
 
PRI NTED AT THE 
 
 SHAKESPEARE HEAD PRESS 
 
 STRATFORD-UPON-AVON 
 

 ^ ,f.« 
 
 :m^:i ^. 
 
 ^■m^ 
 
 V% 
 
 "^<X