Word: virgil
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...week Friend & Enemy Austin lost his voice shouting for Composer Thomson, for the Negro singers, for Conductor Alexander Smallens, for Florine Stettheimer who had done the sets and costumes, for Frederick Ashton who had come from London to devise the action. The Saints were supposed to be Spaniards but Virgil Thomson had chosen Harlem Negroes because of their diction. White singers, he feared, would act foolish and self-conscious chanting such lines as "Let Lucy Lily Lily Lucy Lucy let Lucy Lucy Lily Lily Lily Lily Lily let Lily Lucy Lucy let Lily. Let Lucy Lily...
...VIRGIL THE NECROMANCER: STUDIES IN VIRGILIAN LEGENDS, by John Webster Spargo. Cambridge, Harvard University Press...
LIKE Aristotle, Galen, Hippocrates, and the other great pagans who enjoyed, for whatever reason, a mediaeval reputation, Virgil was vulgared into a necromancer. Although to the learned few he was "poeta doctus," and was through the Fourth Eclogue the cherished prophet of the churchmen, the common legends centered about magic of a more obvious kind, and in them Virgil made glass talismans to confound the flies of Naples...
...mediaeval tradition, loved to interpret this legend weaving as mere monkery; more detachted observers are willing to admit that it is, above all, a tribute to the rich common life of the middle age. That cage, as Domenico Comparetti has carefully shown, understood and venerated the literary art of Virgil, and its educated men read and preserved the Virgilian manuscripts with a diligence not inferior to our own. The common man today does not believe that Virgil was a thaumaturge; but this testifies not so much to a popular rejection of thaumaturgy as to a popular ignorance of Virgil...
Professor Spargo's task is the classification and tracing of the legends; he does not inquire into their psychological motivation, not does he attempt a history of the mediaeval literary criticism of Virgil. That task he has performed with examplary industry; each legend is tracked down to its written origin, and for the commoner of them he has provided a wealth of chronological tables and documentation. The most tenacious of the legends represented Virgil as an humiliated lover, suspended in a basket from his mistress' window. This appeared, in varying forms, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, everywhere with...