believing that Maecenas may have had some influence in determining him to the choice of a subject which enabled him to range over the whole of that field of which he had already appropriated a part, which would afford scope to the literary ambition urging him to write a poem on a greater scale and of more enduring substance, and which, at the same time, might serve indirectly to advance the policy of reconciliation and national and social reorganisation which Caesar and his minister were anxious to promote. Among the ancient arts by which the Latin name and the strength of Italy had waxed great,' none had fallen more into abeyance, through the insecurity of the times, than the cultivation of the land. The restoration of the old 'Coloni' of Italy and the revival of the great forms of national industry, associated with the older and happier memories of Rome, had been a leading feature in the policy of the great popular leaders from the Gracchi down to Julius Caesar. Among the completed glories of the Augustan Age, Horace, some twenty years later, specially notes the restoration of security and abundance to the land :

Tutus bos etenim rura perambulat,
Nutrit rura Ceres almaque faustitas1,

and in the same Ode:

Condit quisque diem collibus in suis,
Et vitem viduas ducit ad arbores 2.

And in the brief summing up of the whole glories of the Augustan reign contained in his latest Ode he begins with the words,

Tua, Caesar, aetas

Fruges et agris rettulit uberes 3.

All Virgil's early associations and sympathies would lead him to identify himself with this object and with the interests and

happiness of such representatives of the old rural life of Italy as might still be found, or might arise again under a secure administration. In proposing to himself some serious aim for the exercise of his poetic gift, it was natural that he should have fixed on that of representing this life in such a way as to create an aspiration for it, and to secure for it the sympathy of the world. The language in which he speaks of the poem as a task imposed on him by Maecenas need not be taken literally: but it is no detraction from Virgil's originality to suppose that he, like Horace, was encouraged by the minister to devote his genius to a purpose which would appeal equally to the sympathies of the statesman and of the poet. The testimony of Virgil's biographer on this subject, which may probably be traced to the original testimony of Melissus, the freedman of Maecenas, is neither to be disregarded nor unduly pressed, any more than the language in which Virgil himself makes acknowledgment of his indebtedness. It is impossible to say what chance seed of casual conversation may have been the original germ of what ultimately became so large and goodly a creation. If, in the composition of the Georgics, Virgil employed his art as an instrument of government, we cannot doubt that he did so not only because he recognised in the subject of the poem one suited to his own genius, but because his past life and early associations brought home to him the desolation caused in the rural districts by the Civil Wars, the moral worth of that old class of husbandmen who had suffered from them, and the public loss arising from the diminution in their number and influence. idealise the life of that class by describing, with realistic fidelity. and in the language of purest poetry, the annual round of labour in which it was passed; to suggest the ever-present charm arising from the intimate contact with the manifold processes and aspects of Nature into which man is brought in this life of labour; to contrast the simplicity and sanctity of such life with the luxury and lawless passions of the great world; and to associate this ideal with the varied beauty of Italy and the historic memories of Rome, were objects worthy of one who

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aspired to fulfil the office of a national poet. It is no detraction from the originality of his idea to suppose that some such suggestion as that attributed to Maecenas gave the original impulse to the poem. Not only the art, genius, and learning, but the religious faith and feeling, the moral and national sympathies, which give to it its peculiar meaning and value, are all the poet's own. His strong feeling for his subject was as little capable of being communicated from without, as the genius with which he adorns it1.

With such feelings as those which were moving the imagination of Virgil, a modern poet might have shaped his subject into the form of a poetic idyl, in which the joys and sorrows of men and women living during this national crisis might have been represented in union with the varied aspects of the scenery and the chief modes of rural industry in Italy. Such a form of art would have enabled the poet to add the interest of individual character and action to his abstract delineation of the 'acer rusticus' or the 'duri agrestes' engaged in a hard struggle with the forces of Nature. And one or two passages, containing some sketch drawn directly from peasant life, as for instance i. 291-296,

Et quidam seros hiberni ad luminis, ignes, etc.,

and iv. 125-146,

Namque sub Oebaliae memini me turribus arcis, etc.,

1 Compare Merivale's History of the Romans under the Empire, chap. xli. The tradition that Maecenas himself suggested the composition of the Georgics may be accepted, not in the literal sense which has generally been attached to it, as a means of reviving the art of husbandry and the cultivation of the devastated soil of Italy; but rather to recommend the principles of the ancient Romans, their love of home, of labour, of piety, and order; to magnify their domestic happiness and greatness, to make men proud of their country on better grounds than the mere glory of its arms and the extent of its conquests. It would be absurd to suppose that Virgil's verses induced any Roman to put his hand to the plough, or to take from his bailiff the management of his own estates; but they served undoubtedly to revive some of the simple tastes and sentiments of the olden time, and perpetuated, amidst the vices and corruptions of the Empire, a pure stream of sober and innocent enjoyments, of which, as we journey onward, we shall rejoice to catch at least occasional glimpses.'

make us regret that the conditions of his art, as conceived by him, did not encourage him to blend something more of idyllic representation with the didactic and descriptive treatment of his subject. But the idyl which treats the incidents of human life in the form either of a continuous poem or of a tale in prose was unknown to the early art of Greece; and Roman imagination was incapable of inventing a perfectly new mould into which to cast its poetic fancies and feelings. Nor is it probable that a poem so truly representative of Italy in all its aspects could have been produced in the form of an idyl, of which the interest would have been concentrated on some family or group of personages.

There was only one form of literary art known to the Greeks or Romans of the Augustan Age which was at all suitable for the treatment on a large scale of such a subject as that which now filled the mind of Virgil. Next after the epic poem of heroic action, the didactic epos was regarded at Rome as the most serious and elaborate form of poetic art. It was more suited than any other form to the Roman mind. It is the only form in which the genius of Rome has produced master-pieces superior not only to anything of the kind produced by Greece but to all similar attempts in modern times. As Roman invention, stimulated by the practical sense of utility, by the passion for vast and massive undertakings, and by the strong perception of order and unity of design, devised a new kind of architecture for the ordinary wants of life, so in accordance with the national bent to reduce all things to rule, to impose the will of a master on obedient subjects, to use the constructive and artistic faculties for some practical end, if it did not create, it gave ampler compass, more solid and massive workmanship, and the associations of great ideas to that form of poetic art which had been the most meagre and unsubstantial of all those invented by the genius of Greece.

Moreover, a new form, or rather a form of more ample capacity, was required to embody the new poetical feelings and experience which now moved the Roman and Italian

mind. If less interest was felt at Rome in following the course of individual destiny, the interest felt in contemplating the outward aspect and secret movement of Nature was now stronger than it had been in the great ages of Greek literature. Though the vivid enjoyment of the outward world had unconsciously shaped the tales of the early Greek mythology, and though this enjoyment had entered directly, as a subordinate element, into the epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry of Greece, and, more prominently, into the later poetry of Alexandria, and although the phenomena and laws of Nature had aroused the speculative curiosity of the early Greek philosophers, no poet before Lucretius had treated of Nature, in the immensity of her range, in the primal elements and living forces of her constitution, and, at the same time, in her manifold aspects of beneficence and beauty, and of destructive energy, as the subject of a great poem. The forms adopted by the great masters of Greek poetry,-the epic, lyric, and dramatic writers, -whose essential business it was to represent the actions and passions of men, were inapplicable to the treatment of this new subject of man's environment. Lucretius accordingly had to take the outline of his form from the early physiological writers, whom the Greeks scarcely ranked among their poets at all, and who, though animated by the speculative passion to penetrate to the secret of Nature, were not specially interested in her aspects of beauty or power, or in her relation to the life of man. If he cannot claim the title of an inventor in art, yet by adding volume and majesty to the rudimentary type of these early writers, he gave to the ancient world the unique specimen of a great philosophical poem.

So too Virgil, penetrated with the feeling of Nature in her relation to human wants and enjoyment, and desirous to give an adequate expression to this feeling, could derive no guidance. from the nobler genius of Greece. To find a suitable vehicle, he had to turn to the earliest and latest periods of her literature. The didactic, as distinct from the philosophic or contemplative poem, was the invention of a time prior to the existence of