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"I have long been persuaded," he writes to Lord Lonsdale in 1829, "that Milton formed his blank verse upon the model of the Georgics and the AEneid, and I am so much struck with this resemblance, that I should, have attempted Virgil in blank verse, had I not been persuaded that no ancient author can with advantage be so rendered.
But already we feel its fatal facility. The passage beginning Atque ubi iam Venerem, in the poem where he contrasts his own life with those of the followers of riches and ambition, is a dilution into twelve couplets of eight noble lines of the Georgics, with an effect almost as feeble, if not so grotesque, as that of the later metaphrasts, who occupied themselves in turning heroic into elegiac poems by inserting a pentameter between each two lines.
And so, although the desultory maxims of the Works and Days give but a faint image of the comprehensive width and studied discursiveness of the Georgics, yet they present a much more real parallel to it than the learned trifling of Aratus or Nicander.
The thirst of fame above mentioned, was a powerful incentive, and is avowed both by Virgil and Horace. The former, in the third book of his Georgics, announces a resolution of rendering himself celebrated, if possible. tentanda via est qua me quoque possim Tollere humo, victorque virum volitare per ora.
Horace, like Virgil, was a favored man, enjoying the friendship of the great with ease, fame, and fortune. His epistles are the most perfect of his productions, and rank with the Georgics of Virgil and the satires of Juvenal, as the most perfect form of Roman verse. His satires are also admirable, but without the fierce vehemence and lofty indignation that characterized Juvenal.
The real merit of Varro's book is that it is the well digested system of an experienced and successful farmer who has seen and practised all that he records. The authority from which Virgil drew the practical farming lore, for which he has been extolled in all ages, was Varro: indeed, as a farm manual the Georgics go astray only when they depart from Varro.
Scarborough, in which he compares his surgical friend, operating for the stone, to Moses striking the rock, more than justifies all the ill that Dryden could lay at his door. It was into precisely such mud-holes that Cowley's Will-o'-the-Wisp had misguided him. Men may never wholly shake off a vice but they are always conscious of it, and hate the tempter. Dedication of Georgics.
He has found out a new sort of poetical Georgics, a trick of sowing wit like clover-grass on barren subjects which would yield nothing before. This is very useful for the times, wherein, some men say, there is no room left for new invention. He will take three grains of wit like the elixir, and projecting it upon the iron age, turn it immediately into gold.
Cicero, upon hearing some lines of them, perceived that they were written in no common strain of poetry, and desired that the whole eclogue might be recited: which being done, he exclaimed, "Magnae spes altera Romae." Another hope of mighty Rome! Virgil's next work was the Georgics, the idea of which is taken from the Erga kai Hmerai, the Works and Days of Hesiod, the poet of Ascra.
The employments, therefore, which we have chosen for the recreation of the students are such as are of greatest public utility: agriculture and architecture. There is something extremely ludicrous in the idea of making the average student delight in spending his leisure hours in farming, by means of a study of the Georgics in the original.
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