In other arts the maturest excellence often foreruns a rapid and inevitable decline. One cause of this seems to be, that the great masters, having once for all expressed in the happiest manner whatever is best worth expressing within the range and vision of their own era, leave to their successors the choice of tamely imitating them or of striving to gain attention, by a strained way of expressing it, for what is not worth expressing in any way. Into the first of these pitfalls the imitative poets of the Flavian era sank; the more ambitious _littérateurs_ of the Neronian Age fell into the second. Another cause of the close connexion between the maturity and the decay of art is that the representation of man and Nature produced by a great master is coloured by his own thought and feeling. The representation thus established gains ascendency over the future. Each new reproduction of this departs further from reality. Art becomes thoroughly conventional. It revives only after a new range of interests, some vital change in belief and ideas, has arisen in the evolution of national life, accompanied by a new birth of original genius, and powerful enough to divert the minds of men from the contemplation of the old to the novel spectacle of the world in which they live. The emotions thus excited force out for themselves a fresh channel: the sound of poetry is again heard in the land, and the hearts of men are refreshed:--
Illa cadens raucum per levia murmur Saxa ciet, scatebrisque arentia temperat arva(135).
The imaginative literature of Greece, of England, and of France has thus renewed itself at various epochs in the history of these nations. Either the life of the ancient world was too much exhausted, or the ascendency of Virgil in the literature of his country was too powerful, to permit the appearance of any new spring of Latin poetry.
Whether the gifts of intellect and feeling by which Virgil represented his country and his age entitle him to a place among the greatest poets of the world, will be answered variously according to the degree in which men recognise in him the presence of that diviner faculty of imagination which no analysis can explain. If we look to him for the original force of creative imagination which we find in Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles on the one hand, and in the greatest poets of modern times on the other, we shall fail to establish his equality with them. But as there have been various types of philosophical intellect in the world, so there have been various types of imaginative power. And among these types we may distinguish those characteristic of the Hellenic, the Germanic, and the Italian races. The genius of the ancient Latin race is further removed from that of the modern Germanic race, than either is from the genius of ancient Greece. The peculiar richness of our own poetic literature arises from its combining some of the great characteristics of each type. While Scott and Byron, for instance, are among the greatest representatives of the purely modern imagination, the works of Pope and Gray are essentially of the Latin type; and those of Dryden, Milton, and Spenser blend Roman strength or the culture of Latin ideas with English boldness and modern exuberance of fancy: while, again, Shelley, Keats, and all the greatest among our living poets have received a powerful impulse from Greek art and Greek ideas. It must be admitted by students of Latin literature that the intellectual movement and sensibility of the present time has a closer affinity with the ancient Greek than with the ancient Latin culture. Students of Homer and Aeschylus, as well as those who have once felt the spell of