This, it must be admitted, seems comparatively remote and unreal beside similar meals in Homer, and absolutely too high a style for camp cookery. Nor is it safe to urge that Vergil is holding his style to the epic level; for that plea opens the way to such mere etiquette as centuries later quite deviated the discussion of epic from its main issues, and, besides, Vergil himself does not thus describe Dares and Entellus. No, the plea must be rather of confession and avoidance. Such passages are not beautiful, and their style is not epic; but they are so few that to call them characteristic is quite unfair. Nor are they to be ascribed to preoccupation with rhetoric. Vergil is, indeed, sometimes more oratorical[37] than we wish; but he is not, in our modern sense rhetorical, and his rhetoric, no less than his poetic, must have found such passages inferior. Rather we may think that these few “rubs and botches in the work” were what led him to wish it burned; for after all his revision he was acutely conscious that it was unfinished. Unfinished in form it certainly is not. Unfinished in style it is here and there. But what a sense of beauty had the artist who could not bear even so few blemishes! Not elaborateness, then, is characteristic of Vergil’s style, but certainly elaboration. His tireless revision is testified by the tradition that he composed first in prose, and that he spent on the _Æneid_ ten years.[38] No style is more highly charged. It is made to suggest at once vivid descriptive imagery and the sanctions of history and religion. Not only the story, but the diction, is full of Rome. His use of the language of Roman ritual[39] is characteristic of an expression piously preservative of cult. “By instinct and temper a ritualist,”[40] he is continually suggesting the significance of traditional forms. The _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ are in a special dialect. The _Faery Queene_ has a language of its own. To achieve such suggestions in the _Æneid_ with but the slightest resort to archaism is in itself a great achievement of language; but it is only part of a consistent allusiveness, an extraordinary connotation, ranging the whole gamut from sharp physical sensations to spiritual significance. A style eminently classic in precision and harmony is yet felt to be above all rich. No other poet seems more nearly infallible with the right word; no other so well to have charged classic restraint with romantic exuberance by the energy of his expressiveness. The influence of Vergil, immediate, wide, and long, is indubitably the influence of his style. Later ages, unappreciative of the poetic art of his composition, felt the spell of his imagery and rhythm almost as an incantation. “Virgil is that poet whose verse has had most power in the world.”[41] (6). _Originality in Imitation_