My answer to this particular objection is, that I have already answered it. Homer does not paint the shield finished, but in the process of creation. Here again he has made use of the happy device of substituting progression for coexistence, and thus converted the tiresome description of an object into a graphic picture of an action. We see not the shield, but the divine master-workman employed upon it. Hammer and tongs in hand he approaches the anvil; and, after having forged the plates from the rough metal, he makes the pictures designed for its decoration rise from the brass, one by one, under his finer blows. Not till the whole is finished do we lose sight of him. At last it is done; and we wonder at the work, but with the believing wonder of an eyewitness who has seen it a-making. The same cannot be said of the shield of Æneas in Virgil. The Roman poet either failed to see the fineness of his model, or the things which he wished to represent upon his shield seemed to him not of such a kind as to allow of their being executed before our eyes. They were prophecies, which the god certainly could not with propriety have uttered in our presence as distinctly as the poet explains them in his work. Prophecies, as such, require a darker speech, in which the names of those persons to come, whose fortunes are predicted, cannot well be spoken. In these actual names, however, lay, it would seem, the chief point of interest to the poet and courtier.[117] But this, though it excuse him, does not do away with the disagreeable effect of his departure from the Homeric method, as all readers of taste will admit. The preparations made by Vulcan are nearly the same in Homer as in Virgil. But while in Homer we see, besides the preparations for the work, the work itself, Virgil, after showing us the god at work with his Cyclops, Ingentem clypeum informant ... ... Alii ventosis follibus auras Accipiunt, redduntque; alii stridentia tingunt Æra lacu. Gemit impositis incudibus antrum. Illi inter sese multa vi brachia tollunt In numerum, versantque tenaci forcipe massam,[118] suddenly drops the curtain and transports us to a wholly different scene. We are gradually led into the valley where Venus appears, bringing Æneas the arms that in the mean while have been finished. She places them against the trunk of an oak; and, after the hero has sufficiently stared at them, and wondered over them, and handled them, and tried them, the description or picture of the shield begins, which grows so cold and tedious from the constantly recurring “here is,” and “there is,” and “near by stands,” and “not far from there is seen,” that all Virgil’s poetic grace is needed to prevent it from becoming intolerable. Since, moreover, this description is not given by Æneas, who delights in the mere figures without any knowledge of their import, ... rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet,