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Two other worthy friends of mine, who desire to have their names concealed, seeing me straitened in my time, took pity on me and gave me the life of Virgil, the two prefaces to the Pastorals and the Georgics and all the arguments in prose to the whole translation; which perhaps has caused a report that the two first poems are not mine.
Go and see my steward, one of the men will take you to him, and tell him what you know of husbandry; 'tis no more, I warrant, than you have learned out of Vergil's Georgics. "Stay," he added, as I turned to go, "we must have a name for you. You can not be a mere cipher in my estate books." "Call me Joe, sir," I said, he thinking me of my friend Punchard.
He read Virgil's Georgics till he did not know bere from barley; and had nearly destroyed the crofts of Beersheba while attempting to cultivate them according to the practice of Columella and Cato the Censor. These blunders occasioned grief to his grand-dame, and disconcerted the good opinion which her neighbour, Davie Deans, had for some time entertained of Reuben.
His delicate health made it easier for him to give his work the slow and arduous elaboration that makes the Georgics in mere technical finish the most perfect work of Latin, or perhaps of any literature. There is no trace of impatience in the work.
But, to pursue the business of this essay, I have always thought that, in poesy, Virgil, Lucretius, Catullus, and Horace by many degrees excel the rest; and signally, Virgil in his Georgics, which I look upon as the most accomplished piece in poetry; and in comparison of which a man may easily discern that there are some places in his AEneids, to which the author would have given a little more of the file, had he had leisure: and the fifth book of his AEneids seems to me the most perfect.
In the Georgics he declares that he will wed Caesar's glories to an epic strain, but though the emperor urged him to undertake the subject, which was besides in strict accordance with epic precedent, his mature judgment led him to reject it.
The growth of the psychological instinct in the Georgics is curiously visible in the episode of Aristaeus, with which the poem now ends.
With these Addison must have ranked, if he had not earned true and lasting glory by performances which very little resembled his juvenile poems. Dryden was now busied with Virgil, and obtained from Addison a critical preface to the Georgics.
The painters draw their nymphs in thin and airy habits, but the weight of gold and of embroideries is reserved for queens and goddesses. Virgil is never frequent in those turns, like Ovid, but much more sparing of them in his "AEneis" than in his Pastorals and Georgics. "Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere manes."
"Bradford thou wast bred to the land wast not?" demanded Hopkins bursting into the house where William Bradford, ill and crippled with rheumatism in his "huckle-bone" or hip-joint, sat beside the fire reading an old Latin copy of the Georgics. "Bred to the land?
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