Excerpt from The Unpublished Legends of Virgil It may be observed that in these Northern legends, Virgil is in most cases Spoken of as a poet as well as magician, but that he is before all, benevolent and genial, a great sage invariably doing good, while always inspired with humour. Mr. Robinson Ellis has shrewdly observed that, in reading the Neapolitan tales of Virgil, we are painfully struck with the absence, for the most part, of any imaginative element in them. I would, however, suggest, that in these which I have gathered with no small pains having devoted a great part of my time for several years to the task - there is no want of imagination, romance or humour. Such are, in brief, the contents of this book. Sincerely trusting that the press and public may treat it as kindly as they did the etrusco-roman Remains, and The Legends of Florence, I await the verdict, which will probably determine whether I Shall publish other Italian traditions, of which I have still a very large collection. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

All classic scholars are familiar with the Legends of Virgil in the Middle Ages, in which the poet appears as a magician, the last and best collection of these being that which forms the second volume of "Virgilio nel Medio Aevo," by Senatro Professor Domenico Comparetti. But having conjectured that Danta must have made Virgil familiar to the people, and that many legends or traditions still remained to be collected, I applied myself to this task, with the result that in due time I gathered, or had gathered for me, about one hundred tales, of which only three or four had a plot in common with the old Neapolitan Virgilian stories, and even these contained original and very curious additional lore. One half of these traditions will be found in this work. -- Preface.

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These are the legends and tales by the classic writer of many ancient Roman and Greek legends, Virgil.