for regret that so much of the faculty, which should have given permanent delight to the world, should have been employed in conveying temporary instruction. His very fidelity to the office of a teacher detracts somewhat from his poetic office. Though it satisfies our curiosity to know how the ancient Italians tilled their lands and cultivated the vine, yet this satisfaction is quite distinct from the joy which the poetical treatment of a poetical subject gives to the imagination. It is not as repertories of useful information that the great writers of Greece and Rome are to be studied. Their importance in this way has long since been superseded. Each generation adds to the stock of knowledge in the world, modifies the results arrived at by the preceding generation, and dispenses with the works in which these results have been embodied. But a work of power, stimulating moral and intellectual feeling,-whether in the form of poem, history, speech, or philosophic dialogue,—may acquire from long antiquity even a stronger hold over the imagination than it originally possessed1. In the didactic poems of Lucretius and Virgil the information conveyed by them possesses permanent value, in so far as it is coloured by human feeling,— in so far as we recognise the passion or affection by which the poet was stirred in acquiring his knowledge and in conveying it to sympathetic readers. And as the scientific enthusiasm of Lucretius animates the driest details of his argument, so the love entertained for his subject by Virgil,as an Italian, the son of a small Italian land-holder, 'Veneto rusticis parentibus nato inter silvas et frutices educto?,'— writing for Italians, for whom every detail of farm labour had a fascination unintelligible to us,-brightens with the gleam of human and poetical feeling the technical teaching of the traditional precepts of Italian husbandry. The 1 Compare the distinction drawn out by De Quincy, and originally suggested by Wordsworth, between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. 2 Macrobius, v. 2. position of a teacher assumed by him,-a position which no great Greek or English poet could gracefully maintain,— impresses us with the thorough adaptation of the form of the poem to the sober practical understanding of the Italian race. Horace mentions this love of teaching and learning as one of the notes distinguishing the Roman from the Greek genius :— Maiores audire, minori dicere per quae Crescere res posset, minui damnosa libido1. It adds to our sense of Virgil's thoroughness as an artist to know that he faithfully performed the office which he undertook; and the fact of his undertaking this office helps to bring home to us the practical, unspeculative genius of those to whom his poem was in the first place addressed. 2. Not only the instruction directly conveyed in the poem, but the frequent illustrations from geography, mythology, and astronomy, have much less meaning to us than they had to the contemporaries of the poet. Yet they help to make us realise the relation in which the Rome and Italy of the Augustan Age stood to the rest of the world and to the culture of the past. By the references to the varied products of other lands we are reminded of the active commercial intercourse between Rome and the East,-a feature of the age of which we are also often reminded in the Odes, Satires, and Epistles of Horace. We see how the success of the Roman arms had made the products of the whole world-the 'saffron dye of Tmolus,' the ivory of India,' the 'spices of Arabia,' the iron of the Chalybians,' the 'medicinal drugs of Pontus,' the brood-mares of Epirus 2'-part of the possessions of Rome. We are reminded too of the fact that many Romans and Italians were settled as colonists in the provinces of the Empire, and that Virgil had them also in view in the instruction which he imparts3. The frequent allusions to Greek mythology and to the constellations, on the other hand, help to remind us that the art and science of the past, as well as the material products of the world, had now been diverted to the enjoyment and use of the new inheritors of intellectual culture. 3. It was seen how assiduously Virgil, in the body of his poem, inculcates the necessity and duty of labour. And though the 'glorification of labour' was found to be rather a derivative and tributary stream than the main current of interest in the poem, yet it is impossible to doubt that to the mind of Virgil this assiduous toil of the husbandman, on a work so congenial and surrounded with such accessories of peaceful happiness, had a special attraction, even independent of its results. This recognition of the dignity of labour owes nothing to a Greek original. A life of intellectual leisure was the ideal of the Greeks. Hesiod indeed does dwell on the necessity of labour, as the ground both of worldly well-being and divine approval,—and this is another point of affinity between him and Virgil,— but the line in which he claims consideration for work, Εργον δ ̓ οὐδὲν ὄνειδος, ἀεργίη δέ τ ̓ ὄνειδος, is apologetic in tone; and, moreover, Hesiod can hardly be regarded as a typical Greek. There seems to be no word in the Greek language equivalent to the grave Roman word 'industria. Perhaps it is owing to the disesteem in which labour was held by Greek writers that industry is scarcely ranked among virtues, nor idleness among vices, even by modern moralists. When long after the time of Homer a new poet arose in Greece, appealing to a great popular sentiment, it was in their passion for the great public games that he found the point of contact with the hearts of his countrymen. The Romans, on the other hand, show a great capacity for labour in every field of exertion,-in war and politics, in law and literature, in business transactions, in the construction of vast works of utility, and in cultivating the land. And of these, next 1 Εργ. κ. Ἡμ. 310. to war and politics, the last was most congenial to the national mind. The land was to the Romans the chief field of their industry and the original source of their wealth, as the sea was the scene of occupation and adventure to the Greeks, and, through the outlet which it gave to the results of their artistic ingenuity, the great source of their wealth. The Odyssey is a poem inspired, in a great degree, by the impulse which first sent the Greek nation forth on its career of maritime and colonising enterprise. The Georgics are inspired by that impulse which first started the Latin race on its career of conquest, and which continued to animate the struggle with the reluctant forces of Nature, as it had animated the struggle with the other races of Italy for the possession of the soil. 4. Again, we find that the poem is pervaded by the poetical feeling of Nature. And Virgil, more than any other poet, presents that aspect of Nature in which the outward world appeared to the educated Italian mind. The personality and individual life attributed to natural objects, such as trees, rivers, winds, etc., belongs to a stage of conception between the Greek anthropomorphism and the recognition by the imagination of universal law and interdependence of phenomena. Modern poets consciously personify natural objects with more boldness and varied sympathy than Virgil. His conception of the life and personal attributes of natural objects appears to be less a conscious creative effort of the imagination, than an unconscious impression from outward things; an impression produced in a state of passive contemplation, rather than of active adventure; and an impression produced by qualities of a serene and tender beauty, rather than by those of a bolder or sublimer aspect. In all these respects Virgil represents a stage in the culture of the imagination between that of the early Greek poets and artists, and that of the most imaginative poets and painters of modern times. The familiar beauty of the outward world, as it was felt by a Roman or Italian, was expressed in the Latin word 'amoenum.' Thus Horace describes his retreat among the Sabine hills, as not only dear to him personally, but as beautiful in itself: Hae latebrae dulces, etiam, si credis, amoenae. And it is to the attributes summed up in that word that Virgil imparts the ideal life of the imagination. But not only is the feeling of Nature in the Georgics characteristic of the highest culture of the Italian mind, but the spectacle of Nature, The outward shows of sky and earth' brought before us,-is that which still delights the eye and moves the imagination in the various districts of Italy. The description of Spring at Georg. ii. 323–345, Ver adeo frondi nemorum, . . . ... exciperet caeli indulgentia terras, is one of which (though we can always feel its beauty) we cannot often verify the accuracy in our more northern latitudes. It is to an Italian spring, more than to any season in any other European country, that the words of the third Eclogue, 'nunc formosissimus annus,' are applicable. The varied pastoral beauty of the long summer day described at Georg. iii. 323-338,-from the early dawn when the fields are fresh beneath the morning-star; through the gathering warmth of the later hours, when the groves are loud with the chirping of the grasshoppers and the herds collect around the deep water-pools; through the burning heat of mid-day, from which the shade of some huge oak or some grove of dark ilexes affords a shelter; till the coolness of evening tempers the air, and the moon renews with dew the dry forest-glades,—is a beauty quite distinct from the charm of freedom and solitude,yet not too remote from human neighbourhood,—of the changing aspects of the sky, and of the picturesque environment of hill or mountain, which abides in the pastoral regions of our own and other northern lands. The 'sweet interchange of hill and valley1,' mountain range 1 'Sweet interchange Of hill and valley, rivers, woods, and plains.' Paradise Lost, Book vii. |