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I. Letter XXXI. Late as it was when I received this insolent letter, I wrote an answer to it directly, that it might be ready for the writer's time of rising. I inclose the rough draught of it. You will see by it how much his vile hint from the Georgic; and his rude one of my whining vocatives, have set me up.
They imagined themselves great bloods during these few minutes after prayers. Sometimes when the House tutor was supposed to be out they would join in a game of football in the passage; but as they were caught once and each got a Georgic, this pastime lost its charm.
I am also bound to tell your lordship, in my own defence, that from the beginning of the first Georgic to the end of the last AEneid, I found the difficulty of translation growing on me in every succeeding book. For Virgil, above all poets, had a stock which I may call almost inexhaustible, of figurative, elegant, and sounding words.
"The meaning of my catechism just now," said her father, addressing me after listening for awhile to her retreating footsteps, "may be the plainer when I tell you that I am translating the works of the Roman poet Virgil, line for line, into English verse, and have just reached the beginning of the Fourth Georgic.
Finally noise subsided into whispering, and whispering into silence and the scratching of pens. There loomed before the Sixth Form visions of a very unpleasant interview with the Chief, and their expectations were not disappointed. The whole form had to stay back on the last day and write out a Georgic. Only the Fifth got off scot-free.
Terence makes no allusion by name to any of his contemporaries; but a line in the Andria is generally supposed to refer to Caecilius, and to indicate his friendly feeling, somewhat as Virgil indicates his admiration for Ennius in the opening of the third Georgic.
They who believe the burden light, let them attempt the fourth, sixth, or eighth Pastoral; the first or fourth Georgic; and, amongst the AEneids, the fourth, the fifth, the seventh, the ninth, the tenth, the eleventh, or the twelfth, for in these I think I have succeeded best. Long before I undertook this work I was no stranger to the original.
You might have told me, Brother, in three lines, what the determination of my friends was; only, that then you would not have had room to display your pedantry by so detestable an allusion or reference to the Georgic. Give me leave to tell you, Sir, that if humanity were a branch of your studies at the university, it has not found a genius in you for mastering it.
"Extremum hunc, Arethusa; . . . . . . neget quis carmina Gallo?" Fabrini I had also sent me from Italy, but either he understands Virgil very imperfectly or I have no knowledge of my author. Being invited by that worthy gentleman, Sir William Bowyer, to Denham Court, I translated the first Georgic at his house and the greatest part of the last AEneid.
But either Mistress Jean's influx of caution came too late, and someone had overheard her suggestion, or the idea was already abroad in the mind bucolic and georgic, for that very night it began to be reported upon the nearer farms, that the Mains of Glashruach was haunted by a brownie who did all the work for both men and maids a circumstance productive of different opinions with regard to the desirableness of a situation there, some asserting they would not fee to it for any amount of wages, and others averring they could desire nothing better than a place where the work was all done for them.
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