Note 3 — PART II (continued 2)

The writings of St. Augustine by their extraordinary variety, vast intellectual range, and the impression of a distinct personal utterance which flows from every page at which they are opened, exercise upon the imagination an effect like that which the works of Diderot or Goethe alone of moderns have the power to reproduce. The De Civitate is his greatest and most sustained effort, and though controversial in intention it reaches again and again an epic sublimity both in imagery and diction. The peoples and empires of the world are the heroes, and the part which Augustine assigns to the God of all the earth has curious reminiscences of the parts played by the deities in pagan poetry. Over the style the influence of Virgil is supreme. Criticism indeed offers few more alluring tasks than the attempt to gauge the comparative effects of the Virgilian cadences upon the styles of the men of after times who loved them most—Tacitus and St. Augustine, Dante, Racine, and Flaubert.