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Thus Virgil in his "Georgics" cites as a fact that mares are fertilised by the wind. His words are given on the next page.
It is probable that Mæcenas, while recognizing the talent of the "Bucolics," saw likewise the unreality of their pictures of life, and gave him the subject of the "Georgics" as being in the same line as that the poet seemed to have chosen for himself, and yet as less liable to lead to imitations and pilferings from Greek originals. In fact there was no work that he could follow.
Virgil in his Georgics almost seems to plagiarize from the description of Job. The Duke of Wellington would not allow any one irreverently to touch his old war-horse, Copenhagen, on whom he had ridden fifteen hours without dismounting at Waterloo; and when old Copenhagen died, his master ordered a military salute fired over his grave.
We shall conclude this short notice with one or two remarks on that love of nature in Latin poetry of which the Georgics are the most renowned example. Dunlop has called Virgil a landscape painter.
The great merit of the Georgics consists in their varied digressions, interesting episodes, and in the sublime bursts of descriptive vigor which are interspersed throughout them. They have frequently been taken as models for imitation by the didactic poets of all nations, and more particularly of England. The "Seasons," for instance, is a thoroughly Virgilian poem.
This, amongst other circumstances treated more at large by Segrais, agrees with the rising of Orion, which caused the tempest described in the beginning of the first book. By some passages in the "Pastorals," but more particularly in the "Georgics," our poet is found to be an exact astronomer, according to the knowledge of that age.
Who knows, after all, but the points and outlines here, may prove but the track of that argument which the new Georgics will be able to hide in the play of their illustration, as Periander hid his? Who knows but the Naturalist in this field was then already on the ground, making his collections?
A recent study of "trees, shrubs and plants of Vergil," illuminating in numberless details, has fallen into the same error here and there by failing to notice that Vergil wrote his Bucolics and Georgics not near Mantua but in southern Italy. The modern botanical critic of Vergil should, as Mackail has said, study the flora of Campania not of Lombardy.
The last two were begun when he was upwards of 70, but he lived to complete them. His Georgics is considered one of the best translations from the classics in the language. Divine, s. of a London merchant, was b. at Hackney, and ed. at Westminster School and Oxf., where in 1660 he was appointed Univ. Orator.
Who is the poet that arrived soon after you in Elysium, whom I saw Spenser lead in and present to Virgil, as the author of a poem resembling the "Georgics"? On his head was a garland of the several kinds of flowers that blow in each season, with evergreens intermixed. Pope. Your description points out Thomson. He painted nature exactly, and with great strength of pencil.
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