CHAPTER XIV.
CONCLUDING REMARKS.
The Æneid has two drawbacks to its popularity as an epic poem amongst modern readers. One defect is common to all classical fiction—that there is no love-romance, properly so called, on the part either of the hero or of any other male character in the poem. Love, as now understood, has no place either in Virgil or Homer. We find in their verse none of those finer shades of feeling, that loyal personal allegiance, that high unselfish devotion, the mysterious sympathy, as untranslatable by anything but itself as the most perfect wording of the poet, which, nursed, it has been said, in the lap of Northern chivalry, but surely of much older birth, has given now for centuries to poet and to novelist their highest charm and inspiration. Poets had to sing as they could without it in Virgil's days. Augustus and Octavia, as they listened to the courtly raconteur, would have opened their eyes wide with astonishment if he had sung to them of the devotion of Lancelot, as surely as they would have laughed at the purity of Galahad. They understood what love was, in their fashion; many ladies of the
