ination as he loved in reality all young things--his tenderness is
so touching that even now we can hardly read them without tears. And not
only is the hero heroic and humane, but he is a just man and keeps
faith; when, in the twelfth book, the Rutulians break the treaty, and
his own men have joined in the unjust combat (xii. 311):

at pius Aeneas dextram tendebat inermem
nudato capite atque suos clamore vocabat:
"quo ruitis? quove ista repens discordia surgit?
o cohibete iras; ictum iam foedus et omnes
compositae leges: mihi ius concurrere soli."

He claims for himself alone, under the guiding hand of providence, the
right to deal with Turnus, the enemy of humanity and righteousness. And
we may note that when it came to that last struggle, though conquering
by divine aid, he was ready to spare the life of the conquered till he
saw the spoils of the young Pallas upon him.

The character of Aeneas, then, though not painted in such strong light
as we moderns might expect or desire, is _intentionally_ developed into
a heroic type in the course of the story--a type which every Roman would
recognise as his own natural ideal. And this growth is the direct result
of religious influence. It is partly the result of the hero's own
natural _pietas_, innate within him from the first, as it was in the
breast of every noble Roman; partly the result of a gradually enlarged
recognition of the will of God, and partly of the strengthening and
almost sacramental process of the journey to Hades, of the revelation
there made of the mysteries of life and death, and of the great future
which Jupiter and the Fates have reserved for the Roman people. In these
three influences Virgil has summed up all the best religious factors of
his day: the instinct of the Roman for religious observance, with all
its natural effect on conduct; the elevating Stoic doctrine which
brought man into immediate relation with the universal; and, lastly,
the tendency to mysticism, Orphic or Pythagorean, which tells of a
yearning in the soul of man to hope for a life beyond this, and to make
of this life a meet preparation for that other.

Only one word more. We can hardly doubt the truth of the story that the
poet died earnestly entreating that this greatest work of his life
should perish with him, and this may aptly remind us that though I have
been treating the Aeneid as a poem of religion and morals, yet, after
all, Virgil was a poet rather than a pre