confused him, and the cry, "There goes Virgil," drove him instantly to seek shelter in the nearest house until the inquisitive crowd dispersed. His relations with Octavian would have been sufficient to make his figure well known to the populace of Rome. The story of the enthusiasm with which the audience in a theater recognized his verses, rising to salute the author in the manner usually reserved for Octavian alone, indicates, also, that, while his appearance was familiar, he was treated with reverential homage. No doubt the universal impression of the ancient world respecting poetry had something to do with the early superstitions respecting Virgil. In his lifetime, and for a long subsequent period, men great in literature were separated from the people by the very same lines as the men of high birth. Genius was no sooner recognized than it was admitted to the imperial circle. This elevation to the highest rank without previous advantages of birth or fortune, with no preliminary course in arms or politics, served to heighten the mystery of the literary art in the eyes of the ungifted multitude. There must have been, the people well might think, some foreshadowing of such strange events. If the ruler, himself a divinity, chose such men for his nearest friends, he must have been guided by some supernatural power. A deity presided surely when these favorites of fortune were brought into the world. So, if we would understand how superstition could envelop Virgil's name in a cloud of mystery we must contemplate him in his personality and in his works, and we must form an estimate of the influence of these upon the people of Virgil's time and of subsequent times. It is difficult to imagine that an easy-going man of the world like Horace should become the subject of a myth. Nevertheless, such a myth arose. How much greater the opportunity was in the case of

Virgil for weird fancies can easily be understood. Germs of a legend were latent in the conception formed of him by his contemporaries. They attributed to him, for example, an extraordinary knowledge of Roman priestcraft. By the natural mutation of words under the influence of a new religion, this came to mean that he was versed in demonology. The revolution in literature and science led to changes in the signification of important descriptive words. What was thought in Virgil's time to be the true and praiseworthy science of divination was looked upon in the middle ages as a part of magic not less diabolical than the other departments of that black science. In the present age divination is considered the mere pretense and trickery of mountebanks. Suppose that Virgil had done for himself what was done by others in his behalf-that is, had laid claim to an intimate acquaintance with astrology; such an assertion in modern. times would be sufficient to fix upon him the character of a quack. In the middle ages, on the contrary, it would have increased his reputation as a magician. These words are in themselves the same, the thread of their history is continuous, but it is not all of one color.

Thus a whole romance, an entire web of legend may be woven-indeed, has been woven-out of the potentialities of a single word. In view of this fact, that must be deemed a very shallow hypothesis which looked upon the romance writing and legend building of Europe as the result of contact with the Arabians. While acknowledging the oriental element in tales about Virgil, as well as in most other necromantic tales, we may safely maintain that this element had been at work through devious and now unknown channels from the earliest times. The European was once an oriental, and the last things

he is likely to forget are the superstitions of his ancient home. There is, indeed, a striking similarity between the literary and even the religious history of the Arabians and that of mediæval Europe. The tendency of both Europeans and Asiatics to wars for the dissemination of their respective creeds was shown at what may roughly be called the same epoch. On both sides were displayed at the same time the fanaticism, asceticism, blind devotion, credulity and alleged miraculous powers, characteristic of a zeal not tempered with knowledge. The classical age of Arabian literature was an age of paganism, and the same was true of Europe. Causes similar to those which barbarized the Latin, also corrupted the ancient purity of the Arabic language. While medieval Europe was at work finding new uses for the fragments of ancient art and learning that had descended to it, medieval Arabians were employed largely with the same material, drawn ultimately from the same sources. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if the results of the literary development of these long separated and conflicting races should have been at many points almost identical. When the imagination of the Arabians was absorbed in the attractions of Greek, Indian and Persian tales, transforming them into romances of which Cairo, Bagdad or Damascus were the legendary centres, the fancy of the European races was equally active, but it naturally transferred the scene of the tales which it recast to localities with which it had at least a nominal familiarity. The relation of these literatures, down to a comparatively recent period, was, therefore, not that of dependence upon each other, but that of a common origin. Nothing shows this more clearly than the demonology of tales as told respectively by the oriental and the European. The Arab converted the

ancient fiery gods of his desert home into afreets and jinn; the European demons, once the deities of the forest, took on the forms and the malignant disposition of reptiles, inhabiting fens and marshes and dank caverns, or lurking in the moist depths of the soil and in the wells and fountains.

III

In the case of Virgil, few or none of the legends are without a counterpart, either a tale or a belief, popular in classic times. The general theory of magic which pervaded Europe in the middle ages owed its existence to classical tradition, modified by the vast accumulation of isolated facts in natural science, and by the change in religious belief from polytheism to monotheism. Pliny was as severe in his denunciation of magic as any modern writer could be, but he included divination, the most profitable branch of trade with the quack astrologer and magician of the present day, in the circle of legitimate sciences. Many things which he related as facts of natural science were in truth only the figments of popular imagination, not yet released from the bonds of that nature worship whose ritual is magic. Apuleius talked of mathematicians as if their principal use was in the calculation of nativities. His defence, when accused of magic, is one of the works which bring us near the superstitions of classic times. Although the charges against him were trumped up by his enemies, yet, to have had any plausibility at all, they must have been in agreement with the general opinion of the times as to what constituted magical practices. From Apuleius's speech, it is to be inferred that in classical Europe devotion to philosophy, and especially to natural science, was

vulgarly deemed an indication of a taste for magic; that poetry and music were a species of incantation; that a mirror in the hands of a philosopher was supposed to be an instrument of supernatural potency; that a mysterious disease like epilepsy was thought to be the result of a magician's malice; that the inhabitants of certain countries were specially skillful in magic arts; that lamps, altars and the sacrilegious imitation of religious rites could be used to baleful purpose by the magician; that statues were sometimes endued with magical powers, and that little images, in the nature of the medieval talismans, were not infrequently used; that an agate, upon being subjected to the action of fire, became sensitive to the diseased condition of the human body, and revealed unsoundness when it was not otherwise apparent; and that the divinations of astrologers and the miracles of magicians were rendered successful by an order of beings intermediate between gods and men. These particulars, and others of a similar character, formed the magic-lore of the middle ages, and some of the very beliefs which Apuleius discussed involve the main points in the legends of Virgil.

Apuleius was a vain man. He was not unwilling to have the reputation of magic, if he could evade the penalty. Therefore, his argument was so conducted as to lead his hearers to an opinion of magic-not as wholly nugatory, which had been the object of Pliny's historical sketch, but as distinguished into two kinds, the one honorable and useful to men, the other wicked and malevolent. This distinction has been urged over and over again by theorists in times when a belief in magic prevailed. It was argued that magic, in the hands of a good man, was equivalent to turning the weapons of evil spirits against themselves. But this hypothesis was far removed from