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Rh attributable in great measure to his insistence on the necessity of sanitary reform, and it was his unceasing efforts that secured for its inhabitants the drainage system, the sewage farms and the good water-supply, the benefits of which are reflected in the decreased death-rale they now enjoy. In respect of hospitals and the treatment of the sick his energy and knowledge were of enormous advantage to his country, both in times of peace and of war, and the unrivalled accommodation for medical treatment possessed by Berlin is a standing tribute to his name, which will be perpetuated in one of the largest hospitals of the city.

 VIRE, a town of north-western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Calvados, 47 m. S.W. of Caen by rail. Pop. (1906) 6228. Vire stands on an eminence surrounded on three sides by the Vire and crowned by the remains of a 12th-century château. The church of Notre Dame (13th to 15th century), and the picturesque Tour de i'Horloge (13th century), beneath which runs the chief street, are the principal buildings. A library and a small museum with good collections of porcelain, pictures and curiosities, are installed in the town hall (17th and 18th centuries). In the public garden there is a statue of Marshal Jacques Goyon, comte de Matignon (1525–1597); and the native poets C. J. L. Chênedollé and P. L. R. Castel are represented, the former by a marble bust, the latter by a bronze statue. Vire grew up around a castle built in the 12th century by Henry I. of England, and in the middle ages was one of the important strongholds of Normandy. South-west of the town is the gorge called Vaux-de-Vire, in which was situated the mill of Olivier Basselin (15th century), the fuller and reputed author of the satiric songs, hence known as "vaudevilles" (see ).

 VIRELAY, the title applied to more than one fixed form of verse, from the French virer, to turn or veer. The history and exact character of the virelay are more obscure than those of any other of the old French forms. It is possible that it is connected with the Provençal ley. Historians of poetry have agreed in stating that it is a modification of the medieval lai, but it is curious that no example of the lai is forthcoming, except the following, which was first printed by the Père Mourgues in his Traite de la Poésie:—

Sur I'appui du Monde Que faut-il qu'on fonde D'espoir? Cette mer profonde Et debris feconde Fait voir Calme au matin I'onde Et I'orage y gronde Le Soir."

But this appears to be not a complete poem, but a fragment of a virelay, which proceeds by shifting or "veering" the two rhymes to an extent limited only by the poet's ingenuity. This is the Old Virelay (virelai ancien), of which examples have been rare in recent literature. There is, however, a New Virelay (virelai nouveau), the newness of which is merely relative, since it was used by Alain Chartier in the 15th century. In French the old and popular verses beginning—

Adieu vous dy triste Lyre, C'est trop apprêter à rire,"

form a perfect example of the New Virelay, and in English we have at least one admirable specimen in Mr Austin Dobson's "July"—

Good-bye to the Town! good-bye! Hurrah! for the sea and the sky!"

The New Virelay is entirely written on two rhymes, and begins with two lines which are destined to form recurrent refrains throughout the whole course of the poem, and, reversed in order, to close it with a couplet. The virelay is a vaguer and less vertebrate form of verse than the sonnet, the ballad or the villanelle, and is of less importance than these in the history of prosody.

 VIRGIL, the great Roman poet, was born on the 15th of October in the year 70 BC, on a farm on the banks of the Mincio, in the district of Andes, not far from the town of Mantua. In the region north of the Po a race of more imaginative susceptibility than the people of Latium formed part of the Latin-speaking population. It was favourable to his development as a national poet that he was born and educated during the interval of comparative calm between the first and second civil wars, and that he belonged to a generation which, as the result of the social war, first enjoyed the sense of an Italian nationality. Yet it was only after Virgil had grown to manhood that the province to which he belonged obtained the full rights of Roman citizenship. It is remarkable that the two poets whose imagination seems to have been most powerfully possessed by the spell of Rome—Ennius and Virgil—were born outside the pale of Roman citizenship.

The scenery familiar to his childhood, which he recalls with affection both in the Eclogues and the Georgics, was that of the green banks and slow windings of the Mincio and the rich pastures in its neighbourhood. Like his friend and contemporary Horace, he sprung from the class of yeomen, whose state he pronounces the happiest allotted to man and most conducive to virtue and piety. Virgil, as well as Horace, was fortunate in having a father who, though probably uneducated himself, discerned his genius and spared no pains in giving it the best culture then obtainable in the world. At the age of twelve he was taken for his education to Cremona, and from an expression in one of the minor poems attributed to him, about the authenticity of which there cannot be any reasonable doubt, it may be inferred that his father accompanied him. Afterwards he removed to Milan, where he continued engaged in study till he went to Rome two years later. The time of his removal to Rome must have nearly coincided with the publication of the poem of Lucretius and of the collected poems of Catullus.

After studying rhetoric he began the study of philosophy under Siron the Epicurean. One of the minor poems written about this time in the scazon metre tells of his delight at the immediate prospect of entering on the study of philosophy, and of the first stirring of that enthusiasm for philosophical investigation which haunted him through the whole of his life. At the end of the poem, the real master passion of his life, the charm of the Muses, reasserts itself (Catalepton v.).

Our next knowledge of him is derived from allusions in the Eclogues, and belongs to a period nine or ten years later. Of what happened to him in the interval, during which the first civil war took place and Julius Caesar was assassinated, we have no indication from ancient testimony or from his own writings. In 42, the year of the battle of Philippi, we find him "cultivating his woodland Muse" under the protection of Asinius Pollio, governor of the district north of the Po. In the following year the famous confiscations of land for the benefit of the soldiers of the triumvirs took place. Of the impression produced on Virgil by these confiscations, and of their effect on his fortunes, we have a vivid record in the first and ninth eclogues. Mantua, in consequence of its vicinity to Cremona, which had been faithful to the cause of the republic, was involved in this calamity; and Virgil's father was 