which he puts into the mouths of his characters. Virgil is essentially a writer for the lover of verbal art. For those who can read Latin with easy and scholarly apprehension he appears to combine the splendid harmonies of Milton with the studied grace of Tennyson and often the polished conciseness of Pope. It is impossible to translate him so as to convey any adequate idea of these qualities, for it is exactly these which are untranslatable. Matthew Arnold, in his _Essays in Criticism_, speaks of individual lines which may serve as touchstones of poetic virtue. In the mere matter of sound each great writer is apt to be distinguishable by such isolated lines. Milton, for example, is only one of many who have written in blank verse. Yet a fragment like A dungeon horrible on all sides round As one great furnace flamed instantly reveals Milton. Virgil answers to the same test of indescribable and incommunicable quality. To the ignorant Middle Ages Virgil became a name to conjure with. He grew, with little apparent reason except his general poetic fame, to be regarded as the embodiment of all pagan wisdom, and it is for this reason that Dante puts himself under the guidance of Virgil in his Hell and Purgatory, though it is the Christian Beatrice, and not the pagan poet, who accompanies him into Paradise. Dante’s _Inferno_ is the sixth book of Virgil’s _Aeneid_ expanded and adapted to the strange blend of rapt mysticism and crude realism which prevailed under mediaeval Catholicism. It is from Virgil’s sixth book, combined with Dante, that Milton derives the main hint and many of the particular suggestions for his Hell in _Paradise Lost_. And it is, in short, to Virgil that all epics have looked since his _Aeneid_ once appeared.