third Ode of Horace may have been carried out, as Prof. Sellar suggests, for the sake of informing himself by personal observation about the localities of the _Aeneid_; for it seems unlikely that the accurate descriptions of Book III. could have been written without some such direct knowledge. The rest of his life presents no event worthy of record. It was given wholly to the cultivation of his art, except in so far as he was taken up with scientific and antiquarian studies, which he felt to be effectual in elevating his thought and deepening his grasp of a great subject. [9] The _Georgics_ were composed at the instance of Maecenas during the seven years 37-30 B.C., and read before Augustus the following year. The _Aeneid_ was written during the remaining years of his life, but was left unfinished, the poet having designed to give three more years to its elaboration. As is well known, it was saved from destruction and given to the world by the emperor's command, contrary to the poet's dying wish and the express injunctions of his will. He died at Brundisium (19 B.C.) at the comparatively early age of 51, of an illness contracted at Megara, and aggravated by a too hurried return. The tour on which he had started was undertaken from a desire to see for himself the coasts of Asia Minor which he had made Aeneas visit. Such was the life and such the premature death of the greatest of Roman bards. Even those who have judged the poems of Virgil most unfavourably speak of his character in terms of warmest praise. He was gentle, innocent, modest, and of a singular sweetness of disposition, which inspired affection even where it was not returned, and in men who rarely showed it. [10] At the same time he is described as silent and even awkward in society, a trait which Dante may have remembered when himself taunted with the same deficiency. His nature was pre-eminently a religious one. Dissatisfied with his own excellence, filled with a deep sense of the unapproachable ideal, he reverenced the ancient faith and the opinions of those who had expounded it. This habit of mind led him to underrate his own poetical genius and to attach too great weight to the precedents and judgment of others. He seems to have thought no writer so common-place as not to yield some thought that he might make his own; and, like Milton, he loves to pay the tribute of a passing allusion to some brother poet, whose character he valued, or whose talent his ready sympathy understood. In an age when licentious writing, at least in youth, was the rule and required no apology, Virgil's early poems are conspicuous by its almost total absence; while the _Georgics_ and _Aeneid_ maintain a standard of lofty purity to which nothing in Latin, and few works in any literature, approach. His flattery of Augustus has been censured as a fault; but up to a certain point it was probably quite sincere. His early intimacy with Varius, the