A Roman Gentleman.

The name Virgil stands not only for certain Latin poetry but also for a period and a people. He was not so great a genius as to be a local anomaly. He was full of only the genius loci. His eye instead of "rolling in a fine frenzy," was in the habit of rolling shut early after dark and of rolling open in the morning twilight. Because of this absence of Sappho's wildness, Byron's misanthropy and Poe's insanity, Virgil is the more pleasing object of study. He may not be as awful as a Vesuvius when in violent eruption, but he possesses a beauty which does not tire so quickly, and he illustrates the truthfulness of the romantic maxim, "Love me little love me long." A writer like Carlyle burns up the attention and interest of his reader and is thus like a dog-day sun which cheers the flowers in the morning and kills

them quite dead long before dinner-time. Virgil was much like our Cowper or our Bryant, not liable to rage with the pen as the pirate does with his cutlass or as a Western cow boy with his favorite pistol. His pen was from the wing of a dove not from the pinion of either an eagle or a goose. He seems so much one of the Roman people of the better class, that he may stand before us this evening as a vis iting guest, coming from an old nation which we all profoundly respect. In the day of our poet the city of Rome contained a population of about two millions; the empire one hundred and twenty millions. As the city was only thirteen miles in circumference the houses must have been remarkably full of occupants. One-half of the population were slaves. These lived in cellars or garrets or were chained in yards or streets. The dwellings of the lower classes were often sixty feet high, story upon story, and thus within such limited city walls a couple of millions could be cared for in some kind of manner the poor people for the most part not

being either students or judges of manner. It was enough that they were permitted to live.

After one-half of the population of Rome and its vicinity has been set aside as slaves, another large number must still be subtracted-the low artisans-before we can find that great middle class or upper class which may stand as represented by this intelligent man from Mantua. Virgil's father was a man of the lower rank, but he worked for a man of the upper class; and as it would seem, employed some of his half-holidays in courting the daughter of his merchant-master; but it was not a case of coachman and heiress. The father accepted the man-servant as a welcomed son-in-law. Thus the bard was the son of the humble workman and the fashionable Maia-a woman who possessed education and poetic sentiment enough to enable her to dream that her baby son was to have lips of song so attractive that the bees would fly around them as though they were rose-leaves.

It is well known that one can never

dream a dream above the reach of his intellect. A clergyman never dreams about decisions and reports in law, and the lawyer returns the compliment or the insult by never dreaming about the Trinity or the fall of Adam. No man in the eighteenth century enjoyed a dream about steamboat or steam cars. Joseph himself, when he dreamed of the sheaves in the harvest field, saw his brothers all there, but he could not perceive any reaping-selfbinding machine. Thus dreams measure the quality of the waking mind and never go beyond the age. The dream of Virgil's mother is proof adequate that Maia was a woman who had some conception of roses, honey and poetic fame and fervor.

Thus we see Virgil springing up in a family in which the father had possessed romance and courage enough to court a girl much above himself in rank, and in which the mother had education enough to make her desire a literary destiny for her From such a family the young lad soon emerged with school books in hand.

son.