Virgil is both the earliest in time and much the most important in rank among the extant poets of the Augustan Age. It is only in comparatively recent times that any question has arisen as to the high position due to him among the great poets of all ages. His pre-eminence not only above all those of his own country, but above all other poets with the exception of Homer, was unquestioned in the ancient Roman world. His countrymen claimed for him a rank on a level with, sometimes even above, that of the great father of European literature. And this estimate of his genius became traditional, and was confirmed by the general voice of modern criticism. For eighteen centuries, wherever any germ of literary taste survived in Europe, his poems were the principal medium through which the heroic age of Greece as well as the ancient life of Rome and Italy was apprehended. No writer has, on the whole, entered so largely and profoundly into the education of three out of the four chief representatives of European culture—the Italians, the French, and the English—at various stages of their intellectual development. The history of the progress of taste might be largely illustrated by reference to the place which the works of Virgil have held, in the teaching of youth and among the refined pleasures of manhood, between the age of Dante and the early part of the present century.