“Take care, father,” cried Brother Jacinth, in an agitated voice.  “Virgil was a magician who wrought marvels by the help of demons.  It is thus he pierced through a mountain near Naples and fashioned a bronze horse that had power to heal all the diseases of horses.  He was a necromancer, and there is still shown, in a certain town in Italy, the mirror in which he made the dead appear.  And yet a woman deceived this great sorcerer.  A Neapolitan courtesan invited him to hoist himself up to her window in the basket that was used to bring the provisions, and she left him all night suspended between two storeys.”

Brother Hilary did not appear to hear these observations.

“Virgil is a prophet,” he replied, “and a prophet who leaves far behind him the sibyls with their sacred verses as well as the daughter of King Priam, and that great diviner of future things, Plato of Athens.  You will find in the fourth of his Syracusan cantos the birth of our Lord foretold in a lancune that seems of heaven rather than of earth.* In the time of my early studies, when I read for the first time jam redit et virgo, I felt myself bathed in an infinite delight, but I immediately experienced intense grief at the thought that, for ever deprived of the presence of God, the author of this prophetic verse, the noblest that has come from human lips, was pining among the heathen in eternal darkness.  This cruel thought did not leave me.  It pursued me even in my studies, my prayers, my meditations, and my ascetic labours.  Thinkin that Virgil was deprived of the sight of God and that possibly he might even be suffering the fate of the reprobate in hell, I could neither enjoy peace nor rest, and I went so far as to exclaim several times a day with my arms outstretched to heaven: 

“’Reveal to me, O Lord, the lot thou hast assigned to him who sang on earth as the angels sing in heaven!’

     Three centuries before the epoch in which our Marbodius
     lived the words—­

     ’Maro, vates gentilium
     Da Christo testimonium.’

     Were sung in the churches on Christmas Day.

“After some years my anguish ceased when I read in an old book that the great apostle St. Paul, who called the Gentiles into the Church of Christ, went to Naples and sanctified with his tears the tomb of the prince of poets.* This was some ground for believing that Virgil, like the Emperor Trajan, was admitted to Paradise because even in error he had a presentiment of the truth.  We are not compelled to believe it, but I can easily persuade myself that it is true.”

Ad maronis mausoleum Ductus, fudit super eum Piae rorem lacrymae.  Quem te, intuit, reddidissem, Si te vivum invenissem Poetarum maxime!

Having thus spoken, old Hilary wished me the peace of a holy night and went away with Brother Jacinth.