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The account may be true, but without further authentication such stories are not to be too implicitly credited on the faith of a people who are fond of the marvellous and addicted to exaggeration. Thus they believed the inhabitants of the island Engano to be all females, who were impregnated by the wind, like the mares in Virgil's Georgics.
Of Latin the first two Georgics and sixth Æneid of Virgil, in Gawain Douglas' translation. Dante; Chaucer, excluding the "Canterbury Tales" but including the "Romance of the Rose"; Gotthelf's "Ulric the Farmer," from the French version which Ruskin had loved ever since his father used to read it him on their first tours in Switzerland; and an early English history by an Oxford friend.
Vergil doubtless spent some time in the city before he turned to the more serious task of the Georgics, but we are told that he preferred the Neapolitan bay and established his home there. This group, it would seem, was definitely drawn into Octavian's circle soon after the peace of Brundisium, and formed the nucleus of a kind of literary academy that set the standards for the Augustan age.
With my rusty old birding-piece I was as ill-equipped for highwaymanship as I was for farming with my Georgics. "Stand and deliver," quoth I to myself, "or I'll double your weight with swan-shot." Were the unknown horseman a resolute man armed with a hair-trigger, I was as good as done for. Arrived in the shelter of the wood, I began picking my way through the thick undergrowth towards the road.
It was given wholly to the cultivation of his art, except in so far as he was taken up with scientific and antiquarian studies, which he felt to be effectual in elevating his thought and deepening his grasp of a great subject. The Georgics were composed at the instance of Maecenas during the seven years 37-30 B.C., and read before Augustus the following year.
The almost religious fervour with which Virgil threw himself into the task of arresting the decay of Italian life, which is the dominant motive of the Aeneid, is present also in the Georgics. The pithy condensation of useful experience characteristic of Cato, "Utiliumque sagax rerum et divina futuri Sortilegis non discrepuit sententia Delphis,"
After he had faced the bitter fact that he was to leave the Æneid unfinished, and had decreed that the great canvas, crowded with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than survive him unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of the Georgics, where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to himself with the thankfulness of a good man, “I was the first to bring the Muse into my country.”
LXXXIX. To MRS. DUNLOP. MAUCHLINE, 4th May 1788. MADAM, Dryden's Virgil has delighted me. I do not know whether the critics will agree with me, but the Georgics are to me by far the best of Virgil.
They assured me that all the stories relating to those creatures were fables; they laughed at the lines which Virgil has devoted to them in the Georgics as well as at all those I quoted to justify my fears. I found Bishop Bernard de Bernardis occupying a hard chair near an old table on which he was writing.
Belloc touches hands very easily with the old Teachers who wrote their precepts in rhyme: such teachers, that is, as had good doctrine to teach, not such as the sophisticated Vergil, whose very naïf Georgics are said to lead to agricultural depression wherever men follow the advice they contain.
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