curean, writes odes to Jupiter,a neat vehicle for compliments to Mæcenas and Augustus. There is no more faith in his invocation to Venus, than in his panegyrics on temperance, if indeed the latter were not written in the brief sincerity of bile and indigestion. He addresses the deities with the smooth strains of a laureate, but not with the emotion of a devotee; and when he describes the vision of Bacchus among the nymphs, his credite posteri imposes a burden on posterity he would have been very loth himself to pay. But the good-humoured lord of the Sabine farm should never have put his Pegasus on a gallop, nor himself into a passion. He is not, like Nick Bottom, "fit for a part to tear a cat in." He has no enthusiasm of any sort, unless it be in speaking of himself. He sings delightfully in his natural tenor, but his bravura is feeble, and a complete falsetto. Horace, however, was professedlyParcus deorum cultor et infrequens, and probably his conversion from the Epicurean tenets by the thunder storm was as lasting as the generality of his resolutions. But Virgil has been commended for the piety of his sentiments, almost as much as for the elegance of his imagery, the depth of his pathos, or the flow of his numbers. It is not very easy to discover from his writings what was his real religion, or whether he had any clear or serious belief in personal and intelligent deities. His Jupiter, Juno, Venus, &c. are transferred from Homer, with some improvement in their manners, but none at all in their morals. He has taken no pains to bring them into keeping with the Platonic and Pantheistic philosophy, which he puts into the mouth of the shade Anchises, nor even wtih the improved state of ethical knowledge displayed in the language and sentiments of his mortal characters. Hence his Gods appear worse than his men, and his men, acting under the guidance of his Gods, seem worse than themselves. Hence, too, arises an inconsistency, too common in narrative poems of which the scene is laid in barbarous ages and countries: the sentiments are at variance with the conduct. The age of Homer is confounded with that of Augustus. Neither is Virgil entirely free from imperfect personifications, the poetical sin which most easily besets mytho-' logy. Thus, in describing the descent of Mercury upon mount Atlas, he forgets that Atlas could not at once be a mountain and a giant. Jamque volans apicem et latera ardua cernit Atlantis duri, cœlum qui vertice fulcit ; Atlantis, cinctum assidue cui nubibus atris Nix humeros infusa tegit; tum flumina Piniferum caput et vento pulsatur et imbri: mento The epithet senis, applied to a mountain, the ice on his beard, and the rivers gushing from his chin, might be supposed to be figurative, though, even then, they would be scarcely worthy of Virgil; but when Mercury precipitates himself from his maternal grand-father, we have only to chuse between conceit and confusion. These inconsistencies, however little they may detract from the transcendent merit of the Æneid, tend to prove that "the intelligible forms of old religion" had neither a correspondent substance in the belief of Virgil, nor even a distinct and permanent existence in his imagination. His Gods "savour not of the reality." They are not altogether like those of Homer, individuals composed of flesh and blood; nor, like those of the mysteries, symbols of general truths or eternal powers. They are mere creatures of memory and tradition, and may be compared to * It is but fair to say that these last lines are by Heyne supposed to be spurious. the figures of an old painting grown dim by time, and retouched by a modern artist, with exquisite skill indeed, yet so that the modern is plainly discernible. So far, however, from wishing to diminish the fame of the Mantuan by one iota, we would fain be persuaded that his very incongruities are the result of refined judgment and consummate art. If the skill of a great musician is displayed in the agreeable management of discords, why may not a poet deserve praise by a judicious use of inconsistencies? The truth is, every writer reflects something of the spirit of his own age; and the age of Virgil was, in respect to religious belief, an inconsistent one. The motley garb of paganism was thread-bare, full of rents, and patched with purple shreds of philosophy, that set off its bareness, and added to its raggedness. Still it was the state uniform, and could not conveniently be thrown aside. Jupiter and Juno were deities by law established, and the ceremonials of polytheism were associated with the institutions of the commonwealth. The family pride of the great, the national pride of the many, were interested in maintaining the ancient superstition. The Gods and Goddesses had made themselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, and were strongly intrenched amid shows and pedigrees. Nor were they unsupported by better feelings, and deeper interests. The sanctity of oaths the dignity of magistrates the discipline of armies, were in danger of perishing with the national religion and all the glories of Rome pleaded in its favour. However little, therefore, the faith of the speculative may have been in that multitudinous rout of deified heroes, and canonised demireps, abstract qualities, and dead, or at best unintelligent powers of nature, aliens, denizens, and natives, Gods by custom, and Gods by statute, whose number was yearly increasing till their very names defied all power of memory; the prevailing system was still hallowed by antiquity, and adorned with splendour;-strong recommendations to a people who had recently exchanged the severity of soldiers for the ostentation of conquerors, not zealous for truth, but passionate for glory. Yet while so many causes conjoined to uphold the ancient signs, their ancient significance was gliding fast away. The Roman religion not being of such a catholic and accommodating character as the Greek, probably suffered much more from the fashionable systems of philosophy. Literal belief was confined to the vulgar, and among them, we may conjecture, to such as were placed out of contact with the halflearned. The disciples of Epicurus, and those of Carneades, and the third academy, alike confident and selfsatisfied, the former pretending to know all things, and the latter as vain of their discovery that nothing is to be known,-by inducing a decay of natural religion, withdrew its support and nourishment from those parasitical superstitions which indicated its vital presence while they concealed its true proportions. The Stoics, professing the most implicit reverence for all that had the sanction of age and authority, talking much of providence, much of the Divinity, much even of an hereafter, by the very sternness of their doctrines, by their pretended indifference to all contingencies, and by their assertion of an absolute free-will, co-existing with an absolute fate, a system, in its consequences, approaching to quietism,-left their gods, in the end, little more effective than those of the Epicureans. For if virtue be the only good, and vice the only evil, and man can attain to the one, and avoid the other, without Divine assistance, if each individual is, or may be, lord of all within, and an inexorable destiny disposes of all without,-what place is there for religion? Neither could the antique faith look for protection or sincere alliance to the Platonists; though some of their successors, in an after age, were induced to lend their support to declining paganism, and to find in the abstruser doctrines of their founder a ready and specious defence for the fables which provoked him to banish Homer from his republic. But the philosophers were never auxiliaries to the popular religion, till they were the enemies of Christianity. In no dissimilar spirit some of the German Illuminati have ranged themselves under the banners of popery. But the purer and elder Platonism: perhaps, the nearest approach to Christian truth that unassisted reason has ever made: and if in some of its speculations it exceeds the limits of the understanding, without attaining to a region of purer light;-if, without due commission, it has presumed to draw "empyreal air;"-still its presumption is of a more amiable kind, more akin to faith, and hope, and adoration, than the conceited nonchalance of the Epicurean, or the self-centering pride of the Stoic. It does, however fancifully, or with whatever mixture of error, it does communicate a hint at the great truth, that man is upon earth a stranger and a pilgrim; it does, obscurely indeed, yet not unintelligibly, point at the fact, that human nature, as it exists, is a fallen thing, and not, as Mr. Pope would persuade us, good, as the nature of beasts, in its own low degree; it does catch a glimpse of that ideal of divine humanity, in which the individual man discovers his own vileness, and grows humble by the contemplation of glory. It does not, indeed, neither could it, reveal the mysteries of the gospel, but it turned the minds of men to the direction in which they were to come. It with drew them from the things of time and sense, and excited a yearning after the eternal and invisible, To a soul possessed with such desires, the worship of the finite must needs have been weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable. A true Platonist must, at least, have been indifferent to a religion like the Roman; a palpable state ordinance, the guardians of which had burned the works of its founder. A creed which could never have been, if Rome had not been, could have little in it to satisfy the searchers for universal, everlasting, necessary truth. But philosophers did not preach to the poor, and pretty generally admitted the expediency of restraining the populace by the chains of sensual superstition. The most enlightened of the heathen, with all their democratic zeal, had no notion of an equality of moral rights, of that equality which is implied by the phrase, Every man has a soul to be, saved." A far more active agent than philosophy was stealing away the life of the popular faith, and turning the time-hallowed ceremonies into mere pageants. The Romans were fast verging to Cosmopolitism. Their religion was Roman exclusively. Their country was the true God of their idolatry, and patriotism the ground and stuff of their piety. Their mytho logy was built up while they were a small and concentrated nation, strongly opposed to all other nations. Now Rome was all the world, and Roman rather a title of honour than a national distinction. Of all human events, it is probable that the blending of nations into one universal empire did most to weaken the influence of polytheism, and prepare the world for Christianity, the whole world's religion. Just in proportion as the feeling of country became less intense, the reverence for local and tutelary deities diminished, and a craving void was left for emotions of deeper and more catholic devotion. 18 Such being the state of belief and unbelief, in the Augustanage, so many interests combining to support the rites and fictions of antiquity, while their power and significance was daily lessening,—those who, wished to maintain the old Roman character for devoutness, and yet to escape the ridicule attached to old fashioned credulity, would na turally be put upon inventing new meanings for old words,-an infallible symptom of the decline of vital religion. Some would explain away, and some would allegorize, and labour with perverse and unprofitable industry to convert the toys of childhood into tools and weapons for maturity. One man would discover that all mythology was composed of enigmatical representations of natu ral philosophy; and what wonder, when a baronet of the 19th century, a man of no small learning and ingenuity, and not a Frenchman, takes pains to assure us, that the twelve patriarchs were neither more nor less than the twelve signs of the zodiac? Another, with equal gravity, would endeavour to prove that all the luscious stories of Venus and Adonis, the amours of Jupiter, and the revels of Bacchus, were moral apologues in commendation of chastity and sobriety; and a third, of less airy genius, would find out that Janus was only a prudent king, whọ calculated correctly upon conse quences, and Prometheus a great astronomer, who had an observatory on Mount Caucasus, and induced a liver complaint by intense application. These divers interpretations, physical, ethical, and historical, swarmed in latter times, increasing with the increase of Christianity, and originating more in the spirit of controversy, which would give up no point of the system it was defending, than in any conviction of their probability. But something of the kind must always take place where a respect for words and forms survives the notions or feeling which gave those words and forms a meaning. There are some, who call themselves Christians, who are not ashamed to use similar double dealing with the Bible. The general effect of all this must have coincided with the discussions of the philosophers-and that enfeebling of local and national attachments, which is an almost certain attendant on advanced civilization, and in Rome was accelerated by the loss of liberty and the corruption of man ners, to destroy all distinct concep tions as to the nature or personality of the objects of worship. The confusion, from which paganism is never the prevailing confusion of ideas. But these arguments are not meant to excuse such modern writers as are guilty of similar incongruities. We have our choice between the simpler and the more mystical theologies of the ancients. We are at liberty to represent the Gods as we please; we are not bound to an agreement with the notions of any period of Greece or Rome, and so can on no account be discharged from the duty of agreeing with ourselves. The Gods of Homer are healthy, living bodies; those of Virgil exhibit some signs of approaching dissolution. Those of the later Romans are seldom better than pictures; often no more than names. We have hitherto considered chiefly the hollow surface of mythology, as it existed after the life and shaping power was gone, in a corrupt and unimaginative age, when poetry was verging to two extremes; to mere arbitrary fiction on the one hand, and to mere matter of fact representation, or exaggeration, malicious or adulatory, of the follies, vices, and wonders of the day. If we except the satirists, the best writers, even of the court of Augustus, were but as mountain reflecting the light of the perfectly free, of presiding powers might r with that over which they were supposed to preside,of Neptune with the sea, of Jupiter with the upper air, &c.-would be much increased, so that the most correct taste could hardly escape it. When Gods become metaphors, and metaphors pass into the current language, it is difficult indeed to treat of a mythological subject, without an occasional jumble. To apply these observations (which we are afraid have grown rather lengthy) to the subject from whence they arose; if Virgil's mythology had been as distinct and uniformly consistent as that of Homer, it might have been more gratifying to good taste at present, but it would not have suited Virgil's age, or reflected the opinions of his contemporaries. His poem is, throughout, an offering to Roman vanity, a grand national poem, and could hardly have seemed enough in earnest without a touch of philosophy; even a little confusion of phrase was necessary to represent orbs of song below the horizon; and this light was cast yet more faintly on their successors. It is, indeed, much to be regretted, that the ancient poets persevered in the choice of mythological subjects, after the true mythological spirit was gone out of the world. Many of the Latins have shown powers of deep and human pathos, which make us régret that they should have continued to talk of Gods, and Goddesses, and heroes, when it is evident they could have made men and women so much more interesting. We are too much in the habit of classing the Greeks and Romans together, and considering their religion as the same; but this impression (it cannot be called an opinion) is highly erroneous. No two nations could be of more distinct characters, as is proved by the ridiculous affectation of Grecism, that was prevalent in the decline of Rome. The Roman mythology is fallen with Rome; indeed it may be said to have fallen with the republic: that of Greece will probably survive, as long as poetry continues to season the dull clod of earth. Less darkly impres sive than the Gothic, less fantastically gorgeous than the Oriental, it stands unrivaled in the beautiful simplicity of its forms, the pregnancy of its symbols, and the plastic facility with which it accommodates itself to the fancy and feelings of all mankind. The Gods of the Greeks were literally all things to all men. To the patriot, they were the guardians of his country; to the antiquary, the founders of nations, the mighty of old time. The mystic theologist adored them as signs of the infinite and eternal; and the physiologist as the unceasing operations of nature. True it is, that in all these shades of faith, from the gross creed of the vulgar, who looked on their deities as capricious despots that were to be bribed or flattered into good humour, to the beautiful imaginations of a Plato, who sought in the depth of his own great soul for the substance of all shadows, there is no stubborn, self-asserting truth; no stuff of the conscience; no heart searching, and no heart's cure: but there is much that soothes, and some thing that elevates; something that calls man out of himself, and persuades him to make interest with Under a cope of variegated sky, Of all adventurers. With unrival'd skill, As nicest observation furnish'd hints No act in the life of a Grecian was below the notice of a deity. Business and pleasure, food and exercise, study and meditation, war and traffic, the best and the vilest deeds alike were hallowed. His creed was associated with all visible greatness, with art and nature, with high aspirings, and tender thoughts, and voluptuous fancies, with the stars of heaven, with mountains and rivers, with the tombs and the fame of his ancestors, with temples and statues, with music and poesy, with all of beauty that he saw, or loved, or longed for, or dreamed of as a possibility. His devotion was no work of a sabbath,— it mingled with his whole existence. Love was piety, a sigh was a prayer, and enjoyment was thanksgiving. The clamour of the city, the riotous joy of the vineyards, the tumultuous pleasure that blazes itself to darkness, the enthusiasm which makes a man a trifle to himself, the intoxication of wine and of glory, these "were no feats of mortal agency; and who might blame the madness which a God inspired? And yet the stillest and the saddest soul that ever loved the moon and the song of the nightingale, stealing apart from the Barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his revelers, |
