I think that, thtilled with a patriotism the keener-edged because it was acquired, he went to work in this way:—­He was going to make one of these long poems, like those (inferior) Greek fellows had; and he was going to make it in Latin. (I do not know which was his native language, or which tradition he grew up in.) He didn’t see why we Romans should not have our ancient greatness sung in epic; weren’t we as good as Homer’s people, anyhow?  Certainly we were; and a deal better!  Well, of course there was our old Saturnian meter; but that wasn’t the kind of way serious poetry was written.  Serious poetry was written in hexameters.  If Greek was his native tongue, he may have spoken Latin all his life, of course, with a Greek accent; and the fact that he was sitting down to make up his ‘poem’ in a meter which no native-born Latin speaker could hear as a meter at all, may have been something of which he was profoundly unconscious.  But that is what he did.  He ignored (mostly) the stresses and accents natural to Latin, and with sweet naivete made a composition that would have scanned if it had been Greek, and that you could make scan by reading with a Greek rhythm or accent.  The Romans accepted it.  That perhaps is to say, that he had no conception at all of poetry as words framed upon an inner music.  I think he was capable of it; that most Romans of the time, supposing they had had the conviction of poethood, would have been capable of it.  It was the kind of people they were.

But that was not all there was to Ennius, by any means.  A poet-soul had incarnated there; he had the root of the matter in him; it was only the racial vehicle that was funny, as you may say.  He was filled with a high conception of the stern grandeur Romans admired; and somehow or other, his lines carry the impress of that grandeur at times:  there is inspiration in them.

And now comes the point I have fetched all this compass to arrive at.  By Spenser’s time, or earlier, in England, all traces of Chaucer’s French accent had gone; the language and the poetry had developed on lines of their own, as true expressions of the national soul.  But in Rome, not so.  Two centuries later great Roman poetry was being written:  a major poet was on the scenes, —­Virgil.  He, I am certain, wrote with genuine music and inspiration.  We have accounts of his reading of his own poems; how he was carried along by the music, chanting the lines in a grand voice that thrilled all who heard.  He chanted, not spoke, them; poets always do.  They formed themselves, grew in his mind, to a natural music already heard there, and existent before the words arose and took shape to it.  That music is the creative force at work, the whirr of the loom of the Eternal; it is the golden-snooded Muses at song.  And therefore he was not, like Ennius, making up his lines on an artificial foreign plan; to my mind that is unthinkable;—­he was writing in the Latin spoken by the cultured; in Latin