ends the description of the various occupations and fieldsports which an Italian winter offers to the husbandman :— Cum nix alta iacet, glaciem cum flumina trudunt. Perhaps none of the minor episodes recurs to the mind so often with so keen a feeling of delight as the passage at IV. 125 to 148, beginning 'Namque sub Oebaliae,' etc. Virgil here introduces himself in his own person, and draws a picture of one whom he had known, and who had interested him as actually realising that life of labour and of happiness in the results of his labour, which in the body of the poem is held up as an abstract ideal. The scene of this vivid reminiscence, the district Qua niger humectat flaventia culta Galaesus,—— seems to have had peculiar attraction both to Virgil and Horace. It is there umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi— that Propertius pictures to himself Virgil meditating his Aeneid and still conning over his earlier Eclogues— Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin arundinibus. It is to 'that nook of earth' that Horace looks, if the unkind Fates forbid his residence at his favourite Tibur, for a resting-place for his 'age to wear away in.' But it is not only to the local charm that attention is drawn, and to the beauty of plant, flower, and fruit, created by the labour of love which the old Cilician gardener-some survivor probably from the Eastern wars of Pompey-bestowed on his neglected spot of ground. Here also the true moral of the poem is pointed, that in the life of rural industry there is a deep source of happiness altogether independent of wealth, and which wealth cannot buy: Regum aequabat opes animis, seraque revertens Nocte domum dapibus mensas onerabat inemptis. A more prominent place is assumed by the two episodes with which the third and fourth Books close. In the first of these, which extends from line 478 to 566, and which describes a great outbreak of cattle-plague among the Noric Alps and the district round the Timavus,-a locality which seems to have had a special attraction to Virgil's imagination, he aims at painting a rival picture to that of the plague at Athens with which the poem of Lucretius ends. It would be unfair to compare the unfinished piece of the older poet, overcrowded as it is with detail and technical phraseology, with an elaborate specimen of Virgil's descriptive power, exercised on a kind of subject in which the speculative genius of the one poet gave him no advantage over the careful and truthful art of the other. Yet, as has been already pointed out2, there are here and there strokes of imaginative power in the larger sketch, and marks of insight into human nobleness, roughly indeed expressed, as at 1243-6 Qui fuerant autem praesto, contagibus ibant in which the supreme quality of the great master still asserts itself. There is great beauty however of pastoral scene, of pathos and human sympathy, of ethical contrast between the simple wants of the lower animals and the artificial luxury of human life, in Virgil's description. In the lines 520-522 one of those scenes in which he most delighted is brought before the imagination :— Non umbrae altorum nemorum, non mollia possunt The last element in the picture suggests at once the 'Saxosas inter decurrunt flumina valles' of the Eclogues, and the lines earlier in the book Saltibus in vacuis pascunt et plena secundum And the whole feeling of the passage is in harmony with that in Lucretius, ii. 361 :— Nec tenerae salices atque herbae rore vigentes 1 Cf. Ecl. viii. 6; Aen. i. 244. 2 Cf. supra, p. 238. And in thorough harmony both with the pathos and the ethical feeling in Lucretius are the following: and it tristis arator, Maerentem abiungens fraterna morte iuvencum1: Quid labor aut benefacta iuvant? quid vomere terras If the space assigned to the different episodes is to be regarded as the measure of their importance, the long episode at the end of the fourth Book, from line 315 to 558, would have to be regarded as of nearly equal value to all the others put together. And yet, notwithstanding the metrical beauty of the passage, it must be difficult for any one who is penetrated by the pervading sentiment of the Georgics to reach this point in the poem without a strong feeling of regret that the jealousy of Augustus had interfered with its original conclusion. As a Greek fable, composed after some Alexandrine model, mainly concerned 1 The truth of this picture is confirmed by a modern writer, who, in her idyllic stories from the rural life of France, seems from time to time, better than any modern poet, to reproduce the Virgilian feeling of Nature. Dans le haut du champ un vieillard, dont le dos large et la figure sévère rappelaient celui d'Holbein, mais dont les vêtements n'annonçaient pas la misère, poussait gravement son areau de forme antique, traîné par deux boeufs tranquilles, à la robe d'un jaune pâle, véritables patriarches de la prairie, hauts de taille, un peu maigres, les cornes longues et rabattues, de ces vieux travailleurs qu'une longue habitude a rendus frères, comme on les appelle dans nos campagnes, et qui, privés l'un de l'autre, se refusent au travail avec un nouveau compagnon et se laissent mourir de chagrin. Les gens qui ne connaissent pas la campagne taxent de fable l'amitié du bœuf pour son camarade d'attelage. Qu'ils viennent voir au fond de l'étable un pauvre animal maigre, exténué, battant de sa queue inquiète ses flancs décharnés, soufflant avec effroi et dédain sur la nourriture qu'on lui présente, les yeux toujours tournés vers la porte, en grattant du pied la place vide à ses côtés, flairant les jougs et les chaînes que son compagnon a portés, et l'appelant sans cesse avec de déplorables mugissements. Le bouvier dira: " 'C'est une paire de boeufs perdue: son frère est mort, et celui-là ne travaillera plus. Il faudrait pouvoir l'engraisser pour l'abattre; mais il ne veut pas manger, et bientôt il sera mort de faim." La Mare au Diable. G. Sand. The famous picture in Lucret. ii. 355-366, At mater viridis. . . notumque requirit, shows a similar observation of the strength of bovine affection. with the fortunes of Orpheus and Eurydice,-for the shepherd Aristaeus, the cultor nemorum cui pinguia Ceae Ter centum rivei tondent dumeta iuvenci, really plays altogether a secondary part in the episode,— it has little to do with rural life, and nothing at all to do with Italy. Its professed object is to give a fabulous explanation of an impossible phenomenon, though one apparently accepted both by Mago and Democritus. To enrich this episode with a beauty not its own, Virgil has robbed his Aeneid,-on the composition of which he must have been well advanced when he was called' on, after the death of Gallus in 26 B.C., to provide a substitute for the passage written in his honour,-of some beautiful lines which are much more in keeping with the larger representation and profounder feeling of the epic poem, than with the transient interest attaching to this recast of a well-known story. Even regarded simply as an epyllion or epic idyl, it may be questioned whether the Pastor Aristaeus is of the highest order of art. It naturally enters into competition with the epic idyl of Catullus, 'Peliaco quondam prognatae vertice pinus,' etc. There is this coincidence between the poems, that they each contain one story or idyllic representation within another, and in each case it is to the secondary representation that the most pathetic and passionate interest belongs. Opinions may differ as to whether the passion of Ariadne or the sorrow of Orpheus is represented with most skill. There seems this difference between the two, that in the one we feel we are reading a fable, that the situation is altogether remote from experience, that it is one suited for a picture or a poem of fancy. We are inclined to apply. to the somewhat wrought-up pathos of the poem the criticism, 'What is Eurydice to him, or he to Eurydice, that he should weep for her?' The beautiful picture of Ariadne, on the other hand, appears like one drawn from the life, and her passionate complaint is like that of a living woman. But still more undoubted is the superiority of Catullus in pictorial or statuesque reproduction seen in that part of his poem in which the original subject, the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, is described. Catullus, above all other Latin poets, except perhaps Ovid, can bring a picture from human life or from outward nature before the inward eye; and this power is, much more than Virgil's power of suggesting deep and delicate shades of inward feeling, appropriate to the more limited compass of the idyl. It is no disparagement to Virgil to say that in this kind of art he is inferior to Catullus. Catullus, though a true Italian in temperament, largely endowed with and freely using the biting raillery-Italum acetum'-which ancient writers ascribe to the race, had in his genius, more than any Roman writer, the disinterested delight in art, irrespective of any personal associations, characteristic of the Greek imagination. Virgil's art, on the other hand, produces its deepest impressions only after his heart has been moved. Even in the Eclogues this is for the most part true. Something must touch his personal sympathies, his moral or religious nature, or his national feeling, before he is roused to high creative effort. In the three cardinal passages which remain to be considered, in the composition of which the deeper elements of Virgil's nature were powerfully moved, the impression which the changing state of the national fortunes produced upon him is vividly stamped. The first of these (i. 464 to the end) was written in the years of uncertainty and alarm preceding the outbreak of the last of the great Civil Wars. The unsettlement all over the Empire, from its eastern boundary to its furthest limits in Europe,-the agitation and impetuous sweep of the river before plunging into the abyss, is described and symbolised in the concluding lines of the Book: Hinc movet Euphrates, illinc Germania bellum; Arma ferunt; saevit toto Mars impius orbe: |