It was their common sense of this danger which drew together Vergil and the Emperor. It is easy to see throughout his poem what critics are accustomed to style a compliment to Augustus. But the loving admiration and reverence of Vergil had no need to stoop to the flattery of compliment. To him Augustus was in a deep and true sense the realization of that ideal Roman whom his song was meant to set in the forefront of Rome. When Antony in the madness of his enchantment forgot the high mission to which Rome was called, the spell had only been broken by the colder "piety" of Cæsar. To Vergil Augustus was the founder of a new Rome, the Æneas who after long wanderings across the strife of civil war had brought her into quiet waters and bound warring factions into a peaceful people. Vergil felt, as even we can feel so many ages later, the sense of a high mission, the calm silent recognition of a vast work to be done, which lifted the cold, passionless Imperator into greatness. It was the bidding of Augustus that had called him from his "rustic measure" to this song of Borne, and the thought of Augustus blended, whether he would or not, with that Rome of the future which seemed growing up under his hands. Unlike too as Vergil was to the Emperor, there was a common undertone of melancholy that drew the two men together. The wreck of the older faiths, the lingering doubt whether good was after all the strongest thing in the world, whether "the gods" were always on the side of justice and right, throws its gloom over the noblest passages of the Æneid. It is the same doubt, hardened by the temper of the man into a colder and more mocking scepticism, that sounds in the "plaudite et valete" of the deathbed of Augustus. The Emperor had played his part well, but it was a part that he could hardly persuade himself was real. All that wisdom and power could do had been done, but Augustus had no faith in the great fabric he had reared. Vergil drew faith in the fortunes of Rome from his own enthusiasm, but to him too the moral order of the world brought only the melancholy doubt of Hamlet. Everywhere we feel "the pity on't." The religious theory of the universe, the order of the world around him, jars at every step with his moral faith. Æneas is the reflection of a time out of joint. Everywhere among good men there was the same moral earnestness, the same stern resolve after nobleness and grandeur of life, and everywhere there was the same inability to harmonize this moral life with the experience of the world.