Pensieri di varia filosofia e di bella letteratura/4447
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notwithstanding this fretting consciousness, he strove, in the way which lay open to him, to give to a poem, which he did not write of his own free choice, the highest degree of beauty it could receive from his hands; that he did not, like Lucan, vainly and blindly affect an inspiration which nature had denied to him; that he did not allow himself to be infatuated, when he was idolized by all around him, and when Propertius sang: Yield, Roman poets, bards of Greece, give way, The Iliad soon shall own a greater lay; that, when death was releasing him from the fetters of civil observances, he wished to destroy what in those solemn moments he could not but view with melancholy, as the groundwork of a false reputation; this is what renders him estimable, and makes us indulgent to all the weaknesses of his poem. The merit of a first attempt is not always decisive: yet Virgil’s first youthful poem shows that he cultivated his powers with incredible industry, and that no faculty expired in him through neglect. But how amiable and generous he was, is evident where he speaks from the heart: not only in the Georgics, and in all his pictures of pure still life; in the epigram on Syron’s (cosí, in vece di Sciron’s) Villa: it is no less visible in his way of introducing those great spirits that beam in Roman story (29-30, 1829).
* Alla p. 4316. Ben d’altra qualità e d’altro peso è la congettura del Niebuhr fondata in profondissima dottrina, e scienza dell’antichità, that the Teucrians and Dardanians, Troy and Hector, ought perhaps to be considered as Pelasgian:... that they were not Phrygians was clearly