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"I have nothing to do with other masters, Williams, you will bring me the fourth Georgic, written out by Saturday morning, for your repeated disobedience. Upton, I have a great mind to punish you also, for tempting him to come here." This was a mistake on Mr. Gordon's part, of which Upton took immediate advantage. "I have no power to prevent it, sir, if he wishes it.
"Hard hailstones lie not thicker on the plain, Nor shaken oaks such show'rs of acorns rain." It is quite certain he had never been bee-hunting. If he had, we should have had a fifth Georgic. Yet he seems to have known that bees sometimes escaped to the woods:
Seeing no other hat to fit him, he very idiotically went on without a hat at all. It would have been far better to have cut parade altogether. Clarke asked him where his hat was, but his ideas on the subject were very nebulous. The whole corps was kept waiting while School House hats were examined. Ten people had got hats other than their own. They each got a Georgic....
He has sometimes a striking line, or a shining paragraph; but in the whole he is warm rather than fervid, and shows more dexterity than strength. He was, however, one of our earliest examples of correctness. The versification which he had learned from Dryden he debased rather than refined. His rhymes are often dissonant; in his Georgic he admits broken lines.
Like much else in the literature of imperial Rome, the passage in the second Georgic to which I have referred is in its essence more modern than the Middle Ages. Mediaeval Christianity involved a divorce from the nature around us, as well as from the nature within.
According to a well-authenticated tradition, the last two hundred and fifty lines of the fourth Georgic were written several years after the rest of the poem, to replace the original conclusion, which had contained the praises of his early friend, Cornelius Gallus, now dead in disgrace and proscribed from court poetry.
"Si, nisi quae forma poterit te digna videri, Nulla futura tua est, nulla futura tua est." Lastly a turn, which I cannot say is absolutely on words for the thought turns with them is in the fourth Georgic of Virgil, where Orpheus is to receive his wife from hell on express condition not to look on her till she was come on earth:
In his twenty-second year he first showed his power of English poetry by some verses addressed to Dryden; and soon after published a translation of the greater part of the Fourth Georgic upon Bees; after which, says Dryden, "my latter swarm is scarcely worth the hiving."
The workers are either too small and quick for it, or else it dreads their sting. Virgil, by the way, had little more than a child's knowledge of the honey-bee. There is little fact and much fable in his fourth Georgic. If he had ever kept bees himself, or even visited an apiary, it is hard to see how he could have believed that the bee in its flight abroad carried a gravel stone for ballast:
Virgil, in his first Georgic, refers to the possible future discovery of Roman remains, and Dryden translates the passage thus: "Then after lapse of time, the lab'ring swains, Who turn the turfs of these unhappy plains, Shall rusty piles from the plough'd furrows take, And over empty helmets pass the rake."
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