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494 almost entirely with the events of Virgil's public life and the development of his ideas; he makes no psychological portrait; you hear nothing of Virgil's emotional life—about which his poetry suggests some curious speculations. I suppose someone will presently psycho-analyse him and poor pius Aeneas and his dreams will stand naked in the lecture-room.

But in the meantime, what is of prime importance is to maintain Virgil's reputation as a poet. Venturing to mention him about a year ago in a company of literary persons I was greeted by hoots and jeers; the grand manner was denounced; and it was generally conceded that no celebrated writer—except Milton—had been so thoroughly discredited. The explanation of the attitude of these people, most of whom were certainly capable of appreciating poetry, and of the two men I mentioned at the beginning of this article is partly, I think, a phobia acquired in boyhood from having had to read the Aeneid in school. We shy instinctively at Virgil in later life, just as we do at the Bible, because we remember it as something intolerably dreary and largely unintelligible which we had to slave over during pleasant afternoons when we would much rather have been doing something else. And I do not much blame schoolboys for being bored with the first few books of the Aeneid which they are usually compelled to read: the fine things are at that age beyond their comprehension and the pseudo-Homeric machinery—the repetitions and conventional formulas which in Homer have all the romantic naiveté of a ballad refrain, in Virgil sound stiff and artificial and are boring to anybody. Besides, Virgil is such a poor story-teller and his characters are so pale. It may be an infantile prejudice on my own part, but I have never been able to feel that even the grand pièce de résistance of the Fourth Book, the episode of Dido and Aeneas, is much of a dramatic success. Dido is ordinarily described as passionate, but she is fluent rather than passionate and, as H. W. Garrod says, even in her most tempestuous outbursts she remembers all the rules of rhetoric. No real conflict takes place between her and Aeneas because Aeneas is completely indifferent; he seems to have no reactions at all one way or the other; and one cannot escape the notion that the poet himself shared not a little of the indifference of his hero. I see no reason for believing that Virgil, whom the Neapolitans called Parthenias, was especially interested in women or that he was emo-