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VERGILIUS, The sixth book of the Aeneid. With introduction and notes (commentary) by H.E. Butler. Blackwell, Oxford, 1920. VII,288p. Original green cloth. Cloth a bit mottled. Library mark to tail spine. Remains of library stickers to first end papers. Library stamps on first pages. ‘Professor Butler’s book will receive a cordial welcome. Both for the knowledge which it presents and not less for the stimulus it will give to the study of the ‘Aeneid’. (…) It is a courageous effort to meet an urgent need, not professing to be a finished monument of scholarship. For however strongly Professor Butler’s readers may dissent from his views on particular passages, and whatever gaps they may find in his knowledge of Vergil, they will none the less accept his book with gratitude as containing the fruit of much fine study, and as an indispensable companion to everyone now teaching Latin in this country. (…) In more than one of his notes (…), Professor Butler recognises (…) Vergil’s constant and characteristic way of transcending controversy by avoiding the precision of prose statement. ‘Vergil was a poet, not a formal theologian, and he used the vague and more awful word ‘Manes’ (not Genius). And if only Professor Butler had realised more fully the importance of this principle throughout, he would have escaped what, so far as I may judge, are the most serious defects of his commentary; and he would also have seen, at least in essence, the answer to a number of the problems which he raises, but does not profess to solve. (…) The truth is that there is no answer to these questions just because Vergil intended there to be no answer. He knew what, apparently, is hard for any commentator to believe, that to pronounce sentence on such cassias these would be at once to forfeit his readers’ confidence, to desert poetry which much teach by suggestion, for the dogmatic philosophy or theology which teaches assertion. (…) And above all poets, Vergil most loved this method of silence, of opening questions, and leaving them unclosed. The Sixth Book even more than the rest owes its hold upon the imagination of Europe to the way in which Vergil’s instinct shaped by almost lifelong reflection has guided him through a maze of incredible and often gruesome mythology, dwelling only on such parts of the old-world pictures as he felt still to have an ethical meaning, and quite deliberately leaving on one side problems which no mortal could answer without stirring disbelief. (…) A certain number of Professor Butler’s statements are demonstrably erroneous. The worst of these do not directly concern the Sixth Book, but they show how impossible it is to expound that Book properly without a sound knowledge of the rest of Vergil. (…) In linguistic matters the book is weak. (…) Some of the obscurities are due to the numerous misprints. The proofreading has been very badly done, no doubt mainly through the absence of any proper qualified reader in the printer’s office. If only Professor Butler had given as much thought and care to the commentary in general as he has given to his best notes, the book would be very good indeed.’ (R.S. CONWAY in The Classical Review, 1921, pp.163-167). € 30.00 (Antiquarian)