Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/230

 212 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. affected by the immediate situation and his feelings toward his correspondent. A true letter is personal to both writer and receiver ; the writer writes not only as he alone would write, but as he would write only to this particular person on this particular occasion. Jerome's sympathetic and irascible temperament, so quickly sensitive to another's personality, keeps his letters real, while his vivacity and power of picturing people and situations keep them interesting. In no other class of writing does he so finely show himself the literary virtuoso that he is. The resources of rhetoric are all drawn upon in them, nor are they void of the vanity of authorship. Jerome edited the col- lection in his lifetime. In those writings of Jerome that may be called literary, — his letters, his lives of saints, his De Viris Ulustribus, his translation and continuation of Euse- bius' chronicle, — he is in language and style a great mediator between classical antiquity and the times which came after him. His language is flexible, it is freed from the Ciceronian period, it can voice Chris- tian feeling ; but it still is pure, and preserves the classical speech as fully as is compatible with the ex- pression of feeling and sentiments that were unknown in the times of Cicero and Virgil. In all these works Jerome is the brilliant man of letters, one who has made classic culture his own so far as that culture might pass into the transformed nature of a Christian of the fourth century. But there was another Jerome, and another side to his work as an author. He was a great Christian scholar, whose powers were conse- crated to gaining the most fundamental knowledge