THE
WORKS
OF
JOHN DRYDEN
VOL. XIV.

THE

WORKS

OF

JOHN DRYDEN,

NOW FIRST COLLECTED

IN EIGHTEEN VOLUMES.

ILLUSTRATED

WITH NOTES,

HISTORICAL, CRITICAL, AND EXPLANATORY,

AND

A LIFE OF THE AUTHOR,

BY

WALTER SCOTT, Esq.

VOL. XIV.

LONDON:

PRINTED FOR WILLIAM MILLER, ALBEMARLE STREET

BY JAMES BALLANTYNE AND CO. EDINBURGH.

1808.

CONTENTS
OF
VOLUME FOURTEENTH.

THE GEORGICS.

TO
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
PHILIP,
EARL OF CHESTERFIELD, &c.[1]

MY LORD,

I cannot begin my address to your lordship better than in the words of Virgil:

----Quod optanti divûm promittere nemo
Auderet, volvenda dies, en, attulit ultro.

Seven years together I have concealed the longing which I had to appear before you: a time as tedious as Æneas passed in his wandering voyage, before he reached the promised Italy. But I considered, that nothing which my meanness could produce, was worthy of your patronage. At last this happy occasion offered, of presenting to you the best poem of the best poet. If I balked this opportunity, I was in despair of finding such another; and, if I took it, I was still uncertain whether you would vouchsafe to accept it from my hands. It was a bold venture which I made, in desiring your permission to lay my unworthy labours at your feet. But my rashness has succeeded beyond my hopes; and you have been pleased not to suffer an old man to go discontented out of the world, for want of that protection, of which he had been so long ambitious. I have known a gentleman in disgrace, and not daring to appear before King Charles the Second, though he much desired it: at length he took the confidence to attend a fair lady to the court, and told his majesty, that, under her protection, he had presumed to wait on him. With the same humble confidence, I present myself before your lordship, and, attending on Virgil, hope a gracious reception. The gentleman succeeded, because the powerful lady was his friend; but I have too much injured my great author, to expect he should intercede for me. I would have translated him; but, according to the literal French and Italian phrases, I fear I have traduced him. It is the fault of many a well-meaning man, to be officious in a wrong place, and do a prejudice where he had endeavoured to do a service. Virgil wrote his Georgics in the full strength and vigour of his age, when his judgment was at the height, and before his fancy was declining. He had (according to our homely saying) his full swing at this poem, beginning it about the age of thirty-five, and scarce concluding it before he arrived at forty. It is observed, both of him and Horace, (and I believe it will hold in all great poets,) that, though they wrote before with a certain heat of genius which inspired them, yet that heat was not perfectly digested. There is required a continuance of warmth, to ripen the best and noblest fruits. Thus Horace, in his First and Second Book of Odes, was still rising, but came not to his meridian till the Third; after which, his judgment was an overpoise to his imagination: he grew too cautious to be bold enough; for he descended in his Fourth by slow degrees, and, in his Satires and Epistles, was more a philosopher and a critic than a poet. In the beginning of summer, the days are almost at a stand, with little variation of length or shortness, because at that time the diurnal motion of the sun partakes more of a right line than of a spiral. The same is the method of nature in the frame of man. He seems at forty to be fully in his summer tropic; somewhat before, and somewhat after, he finds in his soul but small increases or decays. From fifty to three score, the balance generally holds even, in our colder climates: for he loses not much in fancy; and judgement, which is the effect of observation, still increases. His succeeding years afford him little more than the stubble of his own harvest: yet, if his constitution be healthful, his mind may still retain a decent vigour; and the gleanings of that Ephraim, in comparison with others, will surpass the vintage of Abiezer. I have called this somewhere, by a bold metaphor, a green old age; but Virgil has given me his authority for the figure—

Jam senior; sed cruda Deo, viridisque senectus.

Among those few who enjoy the advantage of a latter spring, your lordship is a rare example; who, being now arrived at your great climacteric, yet give no proof of the least decay of your excellent judgment and comprehension of all things which are within the compass of human understanding. Your conversation is as easy as it is instructive; and I could never observe the least vanity, or the least assuming, in any thing you said, but a natural unaffected modesty, full of good sense, and well digested; a clearness of notion, expressed in ready and unstudied words. No man has complained, or even can, that you have discoursed too long on any subject; for you leave us in an eagerness of learning more; pleased with what we hear, but not satisfied, because you will not speak so much as we could wish. I dare not excuse your lordship from this fault; for, though it is none in you, it is one to all who have the happiness of being known to you. I must confess, the critics make it one of Virgil's beauties, that, having said what he thought convenient, he always left somewhat for the imagination of his readers to supply; that they might gratify their fancies, by finding more in what he had written, than at first they could; and think they had added to his thought, when it was all there before-hand, and he only saved himself the expence of words. However it was, I never went from your lordship, but with a longing to return, or without a hearty curse to him who invented ceremonies in the world, and put me on the necessity of withdrawing, when it was my interest, as well as my desire, to have given you a much longer trouble. I cannot imagine, (if your lordship will give me leave to speak my thoughts,) but you have had a more than ordinary vigour in your youth; for too much of heat is required at first, that there may not too little be left at last. A prodigal fire is only capable of large remains; and yours, my lord, still burns the clearer in declining. The blaze is not so fierce as at the first; but the smoke is wholly vanished; and your friends, who stand about you, are not only sensible of a cheerful warmth, but are kept at an awful distance by its force. In my small observations of mankind, I have ever found, that such as are not rather too full of spirit when they are young, degenerate to dulness in their age. Sobriety in our riper years is the effect of a well-concocted warmth: but, where the principles are only phlegm, what can be expected from the waterish matter, but an insipid manhood, and a stupid old infancy—discretion in leading-strings, and a confirmed ignorance on crutches? Virgil, in his Third Georgic, when he describes a colt, who promises a courser for the race, or for the field of battle, shews him the first to pass the bridge, which trembles under him, and to stem the torrent of the flood. His beginnings must be in rashness—a noble fault: but time and experience will correct that error, and tame it into a deliberate and well-weighed courage, which knows both to be cautious and to dare, as occasion offers. Your lordship is a man of honour, not only so unstained, but so unquestioned, that you are the living standard of that heroic virtue; so truly such, that if I would flatter you, I could not. It takes not from you, that you were born with principles of generosity and probity; but it adds to you, that you have cultivated nature, and made those principles the rule and measure of all your actions. The world knows this, without my telling; yet poets have a right of recording it to all posterity:

Dignum laude virum Musa vetat mori.

Epaminondas, Lucullus, and the two first Cæsars, were not esteemed the worse commanders, for having made philosophy and the liberal arts their study. Cicero might have been their equal, but that he wanted courage. To have both these virtues, and to have improved them both with a softness of manners and a sweetness of conversation—few of our nobility can fill that character. One there is, and so conspicuous by his own light, that he needs not

Digito monstrari, et dicier, "Hic est!"

To be nobly born, and of an ancient family, is in the extremes of fortune, either good or bad; for virtue and descent are no inheritance. A long series of ancestors shews the native with great advantage at the first; but, if he any way degenerate from his line, the least spot is visible on ermine. But, to preserve this whiteness in its original purity, you, my lord, have, like that ermine, forsaken the common tract of business, which is not always clean: you have chosen for yourself a private greatness, and will not be polluted with ambition. It has been observed in former times, that none have been so greedy of employments, and of managing the public, as they who have least deserved their stations. But such only merit to be called patriots, under whom we see their country flourish. I have laughed sometimes, (for who would always be a Heraclitus?) when I have reflected on those men, who from time to time have shot themselves into the world. I have seen many successions of them; some bolting out upon the stage with vast applause, and others hissed off, and quitting it with disgrace. But, while they were in action, I have constantly observed, that they seemed desirous to retreat from business; greatness, they said, was nauseous, and a crowd was troublesome: a quiet privacy was their ambition. Some few of them, I believe, said this in earnest, and were making a provision against future want, that they might enjoy their age with ease. They saw the happiness of a private life, and promised to themselves a blessing, which every day it was in their power to possess. But they deferred it, and lingered still at court, because they thought they had not yet enough to make them happy: they would have more, and laid in, to make their solitude luxurious:—a wretched philosophy, which Epicurus never taught them in his garden. They loved the prospect of this quiet in reversion, but were not willing to have it in possession: they would first be old, and make as sure of health and life, as if both of them were at their dispose. But put them to the necessity of a present choice, and they preferred continuance in power; like the wretch who called Death to his assistance, but refused him when he came. The great Scipio was not of their opinion, who indeed sought honours in his youth, and endured the fatigues with which he purchased them. He served his country when it was in need of his courage and conduct, till he thought it was time to serve himself; but dismounted from the saddle when he found the beast which bore him began to grow restiff and ungovernable. But your lordship has given us a better example of moderation. You saw betimes, that ingratitude is not confined to commonwealths; and therefore, though you were formed alike for the greatest of civil employments and military commands, yet you pushed not your fortune to rise in either, but contented yourself with being capable, as much as any whosoever of defending your country with your sword, or assisting it with your counsel, when you were called.[2] For the rest, the respect and love which was paid you, not only in the province where you live, but generally by all who had the happiness to know you, was a wise exchange for the honours of the court—a place of forgetfulness, at the best, for well-deservers. It is necessary, for the polishing of manners, to have breathed that air; but it is infectious, even to the best morals, to live always in it. It is a dangerous commerce, where an honest man is sure at the first of being cheated, and he recovers not his loses, but by learning to cheat others. The undermining smile becomes at length habitual; and the drift of his plausible conversation is only to flatter one, that he may betray another. Yet it is good to have been a looker on, without venturing to play; that a man may know false dice another time, though he never means to use them. I commend not him who never knew a court, but him who forsakes it because he knows it. A young man deserves no praise, who, out of melancholy zeal, leaves the world before he has well tried it, and runs headlong into religion. He who carries a maidenhead into a cloister, is sometimes apt to lose it there, and to repent of his repentance. He only is like to endure austerities, who has already found the inconvenience of pleasures: for almost every man will be making experiments in one part or another of his life; and the danger is the less when we are young; for, having tried it early, we shall not be apt to repeat it afterwards. Your lordship therefore may properly be said to have chosen a retreat, and not to have chosen it till you had maturely weighed the advantages of rising higher, with the hazards of the fall.

Res, non parta labore, sed relicta,

was thought by a poet to be one of the requisites to a happy life. Why should a reasonable man put it into the power of Fortune to make him miserable, when his ancestors have taken care to release him from her? Let him venture, says Horace, qui zonam perdidit. He, who has nothing, plays securely; for he may win, and cannot be poorer if he loses: but he who is born to a plentiful estate, and is ambitious of offices at court, sets a stake to Fortune, which she can seldom answer. If he gains nothing, he loses all, or part of what was once his own; and, if he gets, he cannot be certain but he may refund. In short, however he succeeds, it is covetousness that induced him first to play; and covetousness is the undoubted sign of ill sense at bottom. The odds are against him, that he loses; and one loss may be of more consequence to him than all his former winnings. It is like the present war of the Christians against the Turk: every year they gain a victory, and by that a town; but, if they are once defeated, they lose a province at a blow, and endanger the safety of the whole empire. You, my lord, enjoy your quiet in a garden, where you have not only the leisure of thinking, but the pleasure to think of nothing which can discompose your mind. A good conscience is a port which is land-locked on every side, and where no winds can possibly invade, no tempests can arise. There a man may stand upon the shore, and not only see his own image, but that of his Maker, clearly reflected from the undisturbed and silent waters. Reason was intended for a blessing; and such it is to men of honour and integrity, who desire no more than what they are able to give themselves; like the happy old Corycian, whom my author describes in his Fourth Georgic, whose fruits and sallads, on which he lived contented, were all of his own growth, and his own plantation. Virgil seems to think, that the blessings of a country-life are not complete without an improvement of knowledge by contemplation and reading:

O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona nôrint,
Agricolas!

It is but half possession, not to understand that happiness which we possess. A foundation of good sense, and a cultivation of learning, are required to give a seasoning to retirement, and make us taste the blessing. God has bestowed on your lordship the first of these; and you have bestowed on yourself the second. Eden was not made for beasts, though they were suffered to live in it, but for their master, who studied God in the works of his creation. Neither could the devil have been happy there with all his knowledge; for he wanted innocence to make him so. He brought envy, malice, and ambition, into Paradise, which soured to him the sweetness of the place. Wherever inordinate affections are, 'tis hell. Such only can enjoy the country, who are capable of thinking when they are there, and have left their passions behind them in the town. Then they are prepared for solitude; and, in that solitude, is prepared for them,

Et secura quies, et nescia fallere vita.

As I began this Dedication with a verse of Virgil, so I conclude it with another.

The continuance of your health, to enjoy that happiness which you so well deserve, and which you have provided for yourself, is the sincere and earnest wish of

Your lordship's
Most devoted
And most obedient servant,
John Dryden.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Philip Stanhope, second Earl of Chesterfield, born in 1634. He was a man of considerable talent and political activity; was active in forwarding the Restoration; and enjoyed at the court of Charles II. several offices, but was now retired. He died in 1713.

[2] Dryden's praise, though often hyperbolical, is always founded on some circumstances appropriate to its object. Lord Chesterfield, who had enjoyed offices of honour at the court of Charles II., now lived in retirement at an elegant villa, according to Mr Malone, near Twickenham.

AN
ESSAY
ON
THE GEORGICS.
BY
MR ADDISON.[3]

Virgil may be reckoned the first who introduced three new kinds of poetry among the Romans, which he copied after three the greatest masters of Greece. Theocritus and Homer have still disputed for the advantage over him in Pastoral and Heroics; but I think all are unanimous in giving him the precedence to Hesiod in his "Georgics." The truth of it is, the sweetness and rusticity of a Pastoral cannot be so well expressed in any other tongue as in the Greek, when rightly mixed and qualified with the Doric dialect; nor can the majesty of a Heroic poem anywhere appear so well as in this language, which has a natural greatness in it, and can he often rendered more deep and sonorous by the pronunciation of the Ionians. But, in the middle style, where the writers in both tongues are on a level, we see how far Virgil has excelled all who have written in the same way with him.

There has been abundance of criticism spent on Virgil's "Pastorals" and "Æneïs:" but the "Georgics" are a subject which none of the critics have sufficiently taken into their consideration; most of them passing it over in silence, or casting it under the same head with pastoral: a division by no means proper, unless we suppose the style of a husbandman ought to be imitated in a Georgic, as that of a shepherd is in a Pastoral. But, though the scene of both these poems lies in the same place, the speakers in them are of a quite different character, since the precepts of husbandry are not to be delivered with the simplicity of a ploughman, but with the address of a poet. No rules, therefore, that relate to pastoral, can any way affect the Georgics, which fall under that class of poetry which consists in giving plain and direct instructions to the reader; whether they be moral duties, as those of Theognis and Pythagoras, or philosophical speculations, as those of Aratus and Lucretius, or rules of practice, as those of Hesiod and Virgil. Among these different kinds of subjects, that which the Georgic goes upon, is, I think, the meanest and least improving, but the most pleasing and delightful. Precepts of morality, besides the natural corruption of our tempers, which makes us averse to them, are so abstracted from ideas of sense, that they seldom give an opportunity for those beautiful descriptions and images which are the spirit and life of poetry. Natural philosophy has indeed sensible objects to work upon; but then it often puzzles the reader with the intricacy of its notion, and perplexes him with the multitude of its disputes. But this kind of poetry I am now speaking of, addresses itself wholly to the imagination: it is altogether conversant among the fields and woods, and has the most delightful part of nature for its province. It raises in our minds a pleasing variety of scenes and landscapes, whilst it teaches us, and makes the driest of its precepts look like a description. A Georgic therefore is some part of the science of husbandry put into a pleasing dress, and set off with all the beauties and embellishments of poetry. Now, since this science of husbandry is of a very large extent, the poet shows his skill in singling out such precepts to proceed on, as are useful, and at the same time most capable of ornament. Virgil was so well acquainted with this secret, that, to set off his Georgic, he has run into a set of precepts, which are almost foreign to his subject, in that beautiful account he gives us of the signs in nature, which precede the changes of the weather.

And, if there be so much art in the choice of fit precepts, there is much more required in the treating of them, that they may fall in after each other by a natural unforced method, and show themselves in the best and most advantageous light. They should all be so finely wrought together in the same piece, that no coarse seam may discover where they join; as, in a curious brede of needle-work, one colour falls away by such just degrees, and another rises so insensibly, that we see the variety, without being able to distinguish the total vanishing of the one from the first appearance of the other. Nor is it sufficient to range and dispose this body of precepts into a clear and easy method, unless they are delivered to us in the most pleasing and agreeable manner: for there are several ways of conveying the same truth to the mind of man; and to chuse the pleasantest of these ways, is that which chiefly distinguishes poetry from prose, and makes Virgil's rules of husbandry pleasanter to read than Varro's. Where the prose-writer tells us plainly what ought to be done, the poet often conceals the precept in a description, and represents his countryman performing the action in which he would instruct his reader. Where the one sets out, as fully and distinctly as he can, all the parts of the truth which he would communicate to us, the other singles out the most pleasing circumstance of this truth, and so conveys the whole in a more diverting manner to the understanding. I shall give one instance, out of a multitude of this nature, that might be found in the Georgics, where the reader may see the different ways Virgil has taken to express the same thing, and how much pleasanter every manner of expression is, than the plain and direct mention of it would have been. It is in the Second Georgic, where he tells us what trees will bear grafting on each other:

Et sæpe alterius ramos impune videmus
Vertere in alterius, mutatamque insita mala
Ferre pyrum, et prunis lapidosa rubescere corna.
—Steriles platani malos gessere valentes:
Castaneæ fagus, ornusque incanuit albo
Flore pyri; glandemque sues fregere sub ulmis.
----Nec longum tempus; et ingens
Exiit ad cælum ramis felicibus arbos;
Miraturque novas frondes, et non sua poma.

Here, we see, the poet considered all the effects of this union between trees of different kinds, and took notice of that effect which had the most surprise, and by consequence the most delight in it, to express the capacity that was in them of being thus united. This way of writing is every where much in use among the poets, and is particularly practised by Virgil, who loves to suggest a truth indirectly, and, without giving us a full and open view of it, to let us see just so much as will naturally lead the imagination into all the parts that lie concealed. This is wonderfully diverting to the understanding, thus to receive a precept, that enters, as it were, through a by-way, and to apprehend an idea that draws a whole train after it. For here the mind, which is always delighted with its own discoveries, only takes the hint from the poet, and seems to work out the rest by the strength of her own faculties.

But, since the inculcating precept upon precept will at length prove tiresome to the reader, if he meets with no entertainment,—the poet must take care not to encumber his poem with too much business, but sometimes to relieve the subject with a moral reflection, or let it rest a while for the sake of a pleasant and pertinent digression. Nor is it sufficient to run out into beautiful and diverting digressions, (as it is generally thought,) unless they are brought in aptly, and are something of a piece with the main design of the Georgic: for they ought to have a remote alliance at least to the subject, that so the whole poem may be more uniform and agreeable in all its parts. We should never quite lose sight of the country, though we are sometimes entertained with a distant prospect of it. Of this nature are Virgil's descriptions of the original of agriculture, of the fruitfulness of Italy, of a country life, and the like, which are not brought in by force, but naturally rise out of the principal argument and design of the poem. I know no one digression in the Georgics that may seem to contradict this observation, besides that in the latter end of the first book, where the poet launches out into a discourse of the battle of Pharsalia, and the actions of Augustus: but it is worth while to consider how admirably he has turned the course of his narration into its proper channel, and made his husbandman concerned even in what relates to the battle, in those inimitable lines:

Scilicet et tempus veniet, cum finibus illis
Agricola, incurvo terram molitus aratro,
Exesa inveniet scabrâ rubigine pila,
Aut gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanes,
Grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris.

And afterwards, speaking of Augustus's actions, he still remembers, that agriculture ought to be some way hinted at throughout the whole poem:

----Non ullus aratro
Dignus honos: squalent abductis arva colonis;
Et curvæ rigidum falces conflantur in ensem.

We now come to the style which is proper to a Georgic; and indeed this is the part on which the poet must lay out all his strength, that his words may be warm and glowing, and that every thing he describes may immediately present itself, and rise up to the reader's view. He ought, in particular, to be careful of not letting his subject debase his style, and betray him into a meanness of expression, but every where to keep up his verse in all the pomp of numbers, and dignity of words.

I think nothing, which is a phrase or saying in common talk, should be admitted into a serious poem; because it takes off from the solemnity of the expression, and gives it too great a turn of familiarity. Much less ought the low phrases and terms of art, that are adapted to husbandry, have any place in such a work as the Georgic, which is not to appear in the natural simplicity and nakedness of its subject, but in the pleasantest dress that poetry can bestow on it. Thus Virgil, to deviate from the common form of words, would not make use of tempore, but sidere, in his first verse, and every where else abounds with metaphors, Grecisms, and circumlocutions, to give his verse the greater pomp, and preserve it from sinking into a plebeian style. And herein consists Virgil's master-piece, who has not only excelled all other poets, but even himself, in the language of his Georgics, where we receive more strong and lively ideas of things from his words, than we could have done from the objects themselves; and find our imaginations more affected by his descriptions, than they would have been by the very sight of what he describes.

I shall now, after this short scheme of rules, consider the different success that Hesiod and Virgil have met with in this kind of poetry, which may give us some further notion of the excellence of the Georgics. To begin with Hesiod:—If we may guess at his character from his writings, he had much more of the husbandman than the poet in his temper: he was wonderfully grave, discreet, and frugal: he lived altogether in the country, and was probably, for his great prudence, the oracle of the neighbourhood.—These principles of good husbandry ran through his works, and directed him to the choice of tillage and merchandize, for the subject of that which is the most celebrated of them. He is every where bent on instruction, avoids all manner of digressions, and does not stir out of the field once in the whole Georgic. His method, in describing month after month, with its proper seasons and employments, is too grave and simple; it takes off from the surprise and variety of the poem, and makes the whole look but like a modern almanack in verse. The reader is carried through a course of weather, and may beforehand guess whether he is to meet with snow or rain, clouds or sunshine, in the next description. His descriptions, indeed, have abundance of nature in them; but then it is nature in her simplicity and undress. Thus, when he speaks of January,—"The wild beasts," says he, "run shivering through the woods, with their heads stooping to the ground, and their tails clapt between their legs; the goats and oxen are almost flayed with cold: but it is not so bad with the sheep, because they have a thick coat of wool about them. The old men too are bitterly pinched with the weather: but the young girls feel nothing of it, who sit at home with their mothers by a warm fire-side." Thus does the old gentleman give himself up to a loose kind of tattle rather than endeavour after a just poetical description. Nor has he shown more of art or judgment in the precepts he has given us, which are sown so very thick, that they clog the poem too much, and are often so minute and full of circumstances, that they weaken and unnerve his verse. But, after all, we are beholden to him for the first rough sketch of a Georgic; where we may still discover something venerable in the antiqueness of the work: but, if we would see the design enlarged, the figures reformed, the colouring laid on, and the whole piece finished, we must expect it from a greater master's hand.

Virgil has drawn out the rules of tillage and planting into two books, which Hesiod has dispatched in half a one; but has so raised the natural rudeness and simplicity of his subject with such a significancy of expression, such a pomp of verse, such variety of transitions, and such a solemn air in his reflections, that, if we look on both poets together, we see in one the plainness of a downright countryman, and, in the other, something of a rustic majesty, like that of a Roman dictator at the plough-tail. He delivers the meanest of his precepts with a kind of grandeur: he breaks the clods, and tosses the dung about, with an air of gracefulness. His prognostications of the weather are taken out of Aratus, where we may see how judiciously he has picked out those that are most proper for his husbandman's observation; how he has enforced the expression, and heightened the images, which he found in the original.

The Second Book has more wit in it, and a greater boldness in its metaphors, than any of the rest. The poet, with a great beauty, applies oblivion, ignorance, wonder, desire, and the like, to his trees.—The last Georgic has, indeed, as many metaphors, but not so daring as this; for human thoughts and passions may be more naturally ascribed to a bee, than to an inanimate plant. He who reads over the pleasures of a country life, as they are described by Virgil in the latter end of this book, can scarce be of Virgil's mind in preferring even the life of a philosopher to it.

We may, I think, read the poet's clime in his description; for he seems to have been in a sweat at the writing of it:

----O! qui me gelidis in vallibus Hæmi
Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbrâ!—

and is every where mentioning, among his chief pleasures, the coolness of his shades and rivers, vales and grottoes, which a more northern poet would have omitted for the description of a sunny hill, and fire-side.

The Third Georgic seems to be the most laboured of them all: there is a wonderful vigour and spirit in the description of the horse and chariot-race. The force of love is represented in noble instances, and very sublime expressions. The Scythian winter-piece appears so very cold and bleak to the eye, that a man can scarce look on it without shivering. The murrain, at the end, has all the expressiveness that words can give. It was here that the poet strained hard to out-do Lucretius in the description of his plague: and, if the reader would see what success he had, he may find it at large in Scaliger.

But Virgil seems no where so well pleased, as when he is got among his Bees in the Fourth Georgic; and ennobles the actions of so trivial a creature, with metaphors drawn from the most important concerns of mankind. His verses are not in a greater noise and hurry in the battles of Æneas and Turnus, than in the engagement of two swarms. And as, in his Æneïs, he compares the labours of his Trojans to those of bees and pismires, here he compares the labours of the bees to those of the Cyclops. In short, the last Georgic was a good prelude to the Æneïs, and very well showed what the poet could do in the description of what was really great, by his describing the mock grandeur of an insect with so good a grace. There is more pleasantness in the little platform of a garden, which he gives us about the middle of this book, than in all the spacious walks and water-works of Rapin. The speech of Proteus, at the end, can never be enough admired, and was indeed very fit to conclude so divine a work.

After this particular account of the beauties in the Georgics, I should, in the next place, endeavour to point out its imperfections, if it has any. But, though I think there are some few parts in it that are not so beautiful as the rest, I shall not presume to name them, as rather suspecting my own judgement, than I can believe a fault to be in that poem, which lay so long under Virgil's correction, and had his last hand put to it. The First Georgic was probably burlesqued in the author's life-time; for we still find in the scholiasts a verse that ridicules part of a line translated from Hesiod—Nudus ara, sere nudus: And we may easily guess at the judgment of this extraordinary critic, whoever he was, from his censuring this particular precept. We may be sure Virgil would not have translated it from Hesiod, had he not discovered some beauty in it; and indeed the beauty of it is, what I have before observed to be frequently met with in Virgil, the delivering the precept so indirectly, and singling out the particular circumstance of sowing and ploughing naked, to suggest to us, that these employments are proper only in the hot season of the year.

I shall not here compare the style of the Georgics with that of Lucretius, (which the reader may see already done in the preface to the second volume of Miscellany Poems,) but shall conclude this poem to be the most complete, elaborate, and finished piece of all antiquity. The Æneïs, indeed, is of a nobler kind; but the Georgic is more perfect in its kind. The Æneïs has a greater variety of beauties in it; but those of the Georgic are more exquisite. In short, the Georgic has all the perfection that can be expected in a poem written by the greatest poet in the flower of his age, when his invention was ready, his imagination warm, his judgment settled, and all his faculties in their full vigour and maturity.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Addison had already distinguished himself as a man of letters, and as an admirer of Dryden, by a copy of verses addressed to our author, and by a translation of the Fourth Book of the Georgics, exclusive of the story of Aristæus. This last performance is liberally commended by Dryden in the Postscript to Virgil. The following Essay, which has been much admired for judicious criticism contained in elegant language, was sent by him to our author, but without permission to prefix the writer's name. This circumstance led Tickell to throw some reflection on Dryden, as if he had meant to assume to himself the merit of the composition. This charge was refuted by Steele, in a letter to Congreve, prefixed to an edition of the comedy of "The Drummer," in 1722, who proves, that the Essay was the same paper which Dryden calls the Preface to the Georgics, and which he acknowledges to have been sent by a friend, whose name he was not at liberty to make public. See the article Addison in the "Biographia Britannica."

GEORGICS.
BOOK I.

ARGUMENT.

The poet, in the beginning of this book, propounds the general design of each Georgic: and, after a solemn invocation of all the gods, who are any way related to his subject, he addresses himself, in particular, to Augustus, whom he compliments with divinity; and, after, strikes into his business. He shows the different kinds of tillage proper to different soils; traces out the original of agriculture; gives a catalogue of the husbandman's tools; specifies the employments peculiar to each season; describes the changes of the weather, with the signs in heaven and earth that forbode them; instances many of the prodigies that happened near the time of Julius Cæsar's death; and shuts up all with a supplication to the gods for the safety of Augustus, and the preservation of Rome.[4]

What makes a plenteous harvest, when to turn
The fruitful soil, and when to sow the corn;
The care of sheep, of oxen, and of kine,
And how to raise on elms the teeming vine;
The birth and genius of the frugal Bee,
I sing, Mæcenas, and I sing to thee.
Ye deities! who fields and plains protect,
Who rule the seasons, and the year direct,
Bacchus and fostering Ceres, powers divine,
Who gave us corn for mast, for water, wine—
Ye Fauns, propitious to the rural swains,
Ye Nymphs, that haunt the mountains and the plains,
Join in my work, and to my numbers bring
Your needful succour; for your gifts I sing.
And thou, whose trident struck the teeming earth,
And made a passage for the courser's birth;
And thou, for whom the Cæan shore sustains
The milky herds, that graze the flowery plains;
And thou, the shepherds' tutelary god,
Leave, for a while, O Pan! thy loved abode;
And, if Arcadian fleeces be thy care,
From fields and mountains to my song repair.
Inventor, Pallas, of the fattening oil,
Thou founder of the plough, and ploughman's toil;
And thou, whose hands the shrowd-like cypress rear, } Come, all ye gods and goddesses, that wear } The rural honours, and increase the year; } You, who supply the ground with seeds of grain;
And you, who swell those seeds with kindly rain;
And chiefly thou, whose undetermined state
Is yet the business of the gods' debate,
Whether in after times to be declared
The patron of the world, and Rome's peculiar guard,
Or o'er the fruits and seasons to preside,
And the round circuit of the year to guide—
Powerful of blessings, which thou strew'st around,
And with thy goddess mother's myrtle crowned.
Or wilt thou, Cæsar, chuse the watery reign,
To smooth the surges, and correct the main?
Then mariners, in storms, to thee shall pray; } Even utmost Thule shall thy power obey; } And Neptune shall resign the fasces of the sea. } The watery virgins for thy bed shall strive,
And Tethys all her waves in dowry give.
Or wilt thou bless our summers with thy ray
And, seated near the Balance, poise the days,
Where, in the void of heaven, a space is free,
Betwixt the Scorpion and the Maid, for thee?
The Scorpion, ready to receive thy laws,
Yields half his region, and contracts his claws.
Whatever part of heaven thou shalt obtain,
(For let not hell presume of such a reign;
Nor let so dire a thirst of empire move
Thy mind, to leave thy kindred gods above;
Though Greece admires Elysium's blest retreat,
Though Proserpine affects her silent seat,
And, importuned by Ceres to remove,
Prefers the fields below to those above),
Be thou propitious, Cæsar! guide my course,
And to my bold endeavours add thy force:
Pity the poet's and the ploughman's cares; } Interest thy greatness in our mean affairs, } And use thyself betimes to hear and grant our prayers. } While yet the spring is young, while earth unbinds
Her frozen bosom to the western winds;
While mountain snows dissolve against the sun,
And streams, yet new, from precipices run;
Even in this early dawning of the year,
Produce the plough, and yoke the sturdy steer,
And goad him till he groans beneath his toil,
Till the bright share is buried in the soil.
That crop rewards the greedy peasant's pains, } Which twice the sun, and twice the cold sustains, } And bursts the crowded barns with more than promised gains. } But, ere we stir the yet unbroken ground,
The various course of seasons must be found;
The weather, and the setting of the winds,
The culture suiting to the several kinds
Of seeds and plants, and what will thrive and rise,
And what the genius of the soil denies.
This ground with Bacchus, that with Ceres, suits:
That other loads the trees with happy fruits:
A fourth, with grass unbidden, decks the ground.
Thus Tmolus is with yellow saffron crowned:
India black ebon and white ivory bears;
And soft Idume weeps her odorous tears
Thus Pontus sends her beaver-stones from far;
And naked Spaniards temper steel for war:
Epirus, for the Elean chariot, breeds
(In hopes of palms) a race of running steeds.
This is th' original contract; these the laws
Imposed by Nature, and by Nature's cause,
On sundry places, when Deucalion hurled
His mother's entrails on the desert world;
Whence men, a hard laborious kind, were born. } Then borrow part of winter for thy corn; } And early, with thy team, the glebe in furrows turn; } That, while the turf lies open and unbound,
Succeeding suns may bake the mellow ground.
But, if the soil be barren, only scar
The surface, and but lightly print the share,
When cold Arcturus rises with the sun;
Lest wicked weeds the corn should over-run
In watery soils; or lest the barren sand
Should suck the moisture from the thirsty land.
Both these unhappy soils the swain forbears,
And keeps a sabbath of alternate years,
That the spent earth may gather heart again,
And, bettered by cessation, bear the grain.
At least where vetches, pulse, and tares, have stood,
And stalks of lupines grew, (a stubborn wood,)
The ensuing season, in return, may bear
The bearded product of the golden year:[5]
For flax and oats will burn the tender field,
And sleepy poppies harmful harvests yield.
But sweet vicissitudes of rest and toil
Make easy labour, and renew the soil.
Yet sprinkle sordid ashes all around,
And load with fattening dung thy fallow ground.
Thus change of seeds for meagre soils is best;
And earth manured, not idle, though at rest.
Long practice has a sure improvement found,
With kindled fires to burn the barren ground,
When the light stubble, to the flames resigned,
Is driven along, and crackles in the wind.
Whether from hence the hollow womb of earth
Is warmed with secret strength for better birth;
Or, when the latent vice is cured by fire,
Redundant humours through the pores expire;
Or that the warmth distends the chinks, and makes
New breathings, whence new nourishment she takes;
Or that the heat the gaping ground constrains,
New knits the surface, and new strings the veins;
Lest soaking showers should pierce her secret seat, } Or freezing Boreas chill her genial heat, } Or scorching suns too violently beat. } Nor is the profit small the peasant makes,
Who smooths with harrows, or who pounds with rakes,
The crumbling clods: nor Ceres from on high
Regards his labours with a grudging eye;
Nor his, who ploughs across the furrowed grounds,
And on the back of earth inflicts new wounds;
For he, with frequent exercise, commands
The unwilling soil, and tames the stubborn lands.
Ye swains, invoke the powers who rule the sky,
For a moist summer, and a winter dry;
For winter drought rewards the peasant's pain,
And broods indulgent on the buried grain.
Hence Mysia boasts her harvests, and the tops
Of Gargarus admire their happy crops.
When first the soil receives the fruitful seed,
Make no delay, but cover it with speed:
So fenced from cold, the pliant furrows break,
Before the surly clod resists the rake;
And call the floods from high, to rush amain
With pregnant streams, to swell the teeming grain.
Then, when the fiery suns too fiercely play,
And shrivelled herbs on withering stems decay,
The wary ploughman, on the mountain's brow,
Undams his watery stores—huge torrents flow,
And, rattling down the rocks, large moisture yield,
Tempering the thirsty fever of the field—
And, lest the stem, too feeble for the freight,
Should scarce sustain the head's unwieldy weight,
Sends in his feeding flocks betimes, to invade
The rising bulk of the luxuriant blade,
Ere yet the aspiring offspring of the grain
O'ertops the ridges of the furrowed plain;
And drains the standing waters, when they yield
Too large a beverage to the drunken field:
But most in autumn, and the showery spring,
When dubious months uncertain weather bring;
When fountains open, when impetuous rain
Swells hasty brooks, and pours upon the plain;
When earth with slime and mud is covered o'er,
Or hollow places spew their watery store.
Nor yet the ploughman, nor the labouring steer,
Sustain alone the hazards of the year:
But glutton geese, and the Strymonian crane,
With foreign troops invade the tender grain;
And towering weeds malignant shadows yield;
And spreading succory chokes the rising field.
The sire of gods and men, with hard decrees,
Forbids our plenty to be bought with ease,
And wills that mortal men, inured to toil,
Should exercise, with pains, the grudging soil;
Himself invented first the shining share,
And whetted human industry by care;
Himself did handicrafts and arts ordain,
Nor suffered sloth to rust his active reign.
Ere this, no peasant vexed the peaceful ground,
Which only turfs and greens for altars found:
No fences parted fields, nor marks nor bounds
Distinguished acres of litigious grounds;
But all was common, and the fruitful earth
Was free to give her unexacted birth.
Jove added venom to the viper's brood,
And swelled, with raging storms, the peaceful flood;
Commissioned hungry wolves t' infest the fold,
And shook from oaken leaves the liquid gold;
Removed from human reach the cheerful fire,
And from the rivers bade the wine retire;
That studious need might useful arts explore;
From furrowed fields to reap the foodful store,
And force the veins of clashing flints t' expire
The lurking seeds of their celestial fire.
Then first on seas the hollowed alder swam;
Then sailors quartered heaven, and found a name
For every fixed and every wandering star—
The Pleiads, Hyads, and the Northern Car.
Then toils for beasts, and lime for birds, were found,
And deep-mouthed dogs did forest-walks surround;
And casting-nets were spread in shallow brooks,
Drags in the deep, and baits were hung on hooks.
Then saws were toothed, and sounding axes made;
(For wedges first did yielding wood invade,)
And various arts in order did succeed,
(What cannot endless labour, urged by need?)
First Ceres taught, the ground with grain to sow,
And armed with iron shares the crooked plough;
When now Dodonian oaks no more supplied
Their mast, and trees their forest-fruit denied.
Soon was his labour doubled to the swain,
And blasting mildews blackened all his grain:
Tough thistles choked the fields, and killed the corn,
And an unthrifty crop of weeds was born:
Then burs and brambles, an unbidden crew
Of graceless guests, the unhappy fields subdue;
And oats unblest, and darnel domineers,
And shoots its head above the shining ears;
So that, unless the land with daily care
Is exercised, and, with an iron war
Of rakes and harrows, the proud foes expelled,
And birds with clamours frighted from the field—
Unless the boughs are lopped that shade the plain,
And heaven invoked with vows for fruitful rain—
On others'[6] crops you may with envy look,
And shake for food the long-abandoned oak.
Nor must we pass untold what arms they wield,
Who labour tillage and the furrowed field;
Without whose aid the ground her corn denies,
And nothing can be sown, and nothing rise—
The crooked plough, the share, the towering height
Of waggons, and the cart's unwieldy weight,
The sled, the tumbril, hurdles, and the flail,
The fan of Bacchus, with the flying sail—
These all must be prepared, if ploughmen hope
The promised blessing of a bounteous crop.
Young elms, with early force, in copses bow,
Fit for the figure of the crooked plough.
Of eight foot long a fastened beam prepare: } On either side the head, produce an ear; } And sink a socket for the shining share. } Of beech the plough-tail, and the bending yoke,
Or softer linden hardened in the smoke.
I could be long in precepts; but I fear
So mean a subject might offend your ear.
Delve of convenient depth your thrashing floor:
With tempered clay then fill and face it o'er;
And let the weighty roller run the round,
To smooth the surface of the unequal ground;
Lest, cracked with summer heats, the flooring flies,
Or sinks, and through the crannies weeds arise:
For sundry foes the rural realm surround:
The field-mouse builds her garner under ground
For gathered grain: the blind laborious mole
In winding mazes works her hidden hole:
In hollow caverns vermin make abode—
The hissing serpent, and the swelling toad:
The corn-devouring weasel here abides,
And the wise ant her wintery store provides.
Mark well the flowering almonds in the wood:
If odorous blooms the bearing branches load,
The glebe will answer to the sylvan reign;
Great heats will follow, and large crops of grain.
But, if a wood of leaves o'ershade the tree,
Such and so barren will thy harvest be:
In vain the hind shall vex the thrashing-floor;
For empty chaff and straw will be thy store.
Some steep their seed, and some in cauldrons boil,
With vigorous nitre and with lees of oil,
O'er gentle fires, the exuberant juice to drain,
And swell the flattering husks with fruitful grain.
Yet is not the success for years assured,
Though chosen is the seed, and fully cured,
Unless the peasant, with his annual pain,
Renews his choice, and culls the largest grain.
Thus all below, whether by Nature's curse,
Or Fate's decree, degenerate still to worse.
So the boat's brawny crew the current stem,
And, slow advancing, struggle with the stream:
But, if they slack their hands, or cease to strive,
Then down the flood with headlong haste they drive.
Nor must the ploughman less observe the skies,
When the Kids, Dragon, and Arcturus, rise,
Than sailors homeward bent, who cut their way
Through Helle's stormy straits, and oyster-breeding sea.
But, when Astræa's balance, hung on high,
Betwixt the nights and days divides the sky,
Then yoke your oxen, sow your winter grain,
Till cold December comes with driving rain.
Linseed and fruitful poppy bury warm,
In a dry season, and prevent the storm.
Sow beans and clover in a rotten soil,
And millet rising from your annual toil,
When with his golden horns, in full career, } The Bull beats down the barriers of the year, } And Argo[7] and the Dog forsake the northern sphere. } But, if your care to wheat alone extend, } Let Maia with her sisters first descend, } And the bright Gnossian diadem downward bend, } Before you trust in earth your future hope;
Or else expect a listless lazy crop.
Some swains have sown before; but most have found
A husky harvest from the grudging ground.
Vile vetches would you sow, or lentils lean,
The growth of Egypt, or the kidney-bean?
Begin when the slow waggoner descends;
Nor cease your sowing till mid-winter ends.
For this, through twelve bright signs Apollo guides
The year, and earth in several climes divides.
Five girdles bind the skies: the torrid zone
Glows with the passing and repassing sun:
Far on the right and left, the extremes of heaven
To frosts and snows and bitter blasts are given:
Betwixt the midst and these, the gods assigned
Two habitable seats for human kind,
And, 'cross their limits, cut a sloping way,
Which the twelve signs in beauteous order sway.
Two poles turn round the globe; one seen to rise
O'er Scythian hills, and one in Libyan skies;
The first sublime in heaven, the last is whirled
Below the regions of the nether world.
Around our pole the spiry Dragon glides,
And, like a winding stream, the Bears divides—
The less and greater, who, by Fate's decree,
Abhor to dive beneath the northern sea.[8]
There, as they say, perpetual night is found
In silence brooding on the unhappy ground:
Or, when Aurora leaves our northern sphere,
She lights the downward heaven, and rises there;
And, when on us she breathes the living light,
Red Vesper kindles there the tapers of the night.
From hence uncertain seasons we may know,
And when to reap the grain, and when to sow;
Or when to fell the furzes; when 'tis meet
To spread the flying canvas for the fleet.
Observe what stars arise, or disappear;
And the four quarters of the rolling year.
But, when cold weather and continued rain
The labouring husband in his house restrain,
Let him forecast his work with timely care, } Which else is huddled, when the skies are fair: } Then let him mark the sheep, or whet the shining share, } Or hollow trees for boats, or number o'er
His sacks, or measure his increasing store,
Or sharpen stakes, or head the forks, or twine
The sallow twigs to tie the straggling vine;
Or wicker baskets weave, or air the corn,
Or grinded grain betwixt two marbles turn.
No laws, divine or human, can restrain
From necessary works the labouring swain.
Even holidays and feasts permission yield
To float the meadows, or to fence the field,
To fire the brambles, snare the birds, and steep
In wholesome water-falls the woolly sheep.
And oft the drudging ass is driven, with toil,
To neighbouring towns with apples and with oil;
Returning, late and loaden, home with gain
Of bartered pitch, and hand-mills for the grain.
The lucky days, in each revolving moon,
For labour chuse: the fifth be sure to shun;
That gave the Furies and pale Pluto birth,
And armed, against the skies, the sons of earth.
With mountains piled on mountains, thrice they strove
To scale the steepy battlements of Jove;
And thrice his lightning and red thunder played,
And their demolished works in ruin laid.
The seventh is, next the tenth, the best to join
Young oxen to the yoke, and plant the vine.
Then, weavers, stretch your stays upon the weft:
The ninth is good for travel, bad for theft.
Some works in dead of night are better done,
Or when the morning dew prevents the sun.
Parched meads and stubble mow by Phœbe's light,
Which both require the coolness of the night;
For moisture then abounds, and pearly rains
Descend in silence to refresh the plains.
The wife and husband equally conspire
To work by night, and rake the winter fire:
He sharpens torches in the glimmering room;
She shoots the flying shuttle through the loom,
Or boils in kettles must of wine, and skims,
With leaves, the dregs that overflow the brims:
And, till the watchful cock awakes the day,
She sings, to drive the tedious hours away.
But, in warm weather, when the skies are clear,
By day-light reap the product of the year;
And in the sun your golden grain display,
And thrash it out, and winnow it by day.
Plough naked, swain, and naked sow the land;
For lazy winter numbs the labouring hand.
In genial winter, swains enjoy their store,
Forget their hardships, and recruit for more.
The farmer to full bowls invites his friends,
And, what he got with pains, with pleasure spends.
So sailors, when escaped from stormy seas,
First crown their vessels, then indulge their ease.
Yet that's the proper time to thrash the wood
For mast of oak, your fathers' homely food;
To gather laurel-berries, and the spoil
Of bloody myrtles, and to press your oil;
For stalking cranes to set the guileful snare;
T'inclose the stags in toils, and hunt the hare;
With Balearic slings, or Gnossian bow,
To persecute from far the flying doe,
Then, when the fleecy skies new clothe the wood,
And cakes of rustling ice come rolling down the flood.
Now sing we stormy stars, when autumn weighs } The year, and adds to nights, and shortens days, } And suns declining shine with feeble rays: } What cares must then attend the toiling swain; } Or when the low'ring spring, with lavish rain, } Beats down the slender stem and bearded grain, } While yet the head is green, or, lightly swelled
With milky moisture, overlooks the field.
Even when the farmer, now secure of fear,
Sends in the swains to spoil the finished year,
Even while the reaper fills his greedy hands,
And binds the golden sheaves in brittle bands,
Oft have I seen a sudden storm arise,
From all the warring winds that sweep the skies:
The heavy harvest from the root is torn,
And whirled aloft the lighter stubble borne:
With such a force the flying rack is driven,
And such a winter wears the face of heaven:
And oft whole sheets descend of sluicy rain,
Sucked by the spongy clouds from off the main:
The lofty skies[9] at once come pouring down,
The promised crop and golden labours drown.
The dikes are filled; and, with a roaring sound, } The rising rivers float the nether ground, } And rocks the bellowing voice of boiling seas rebound. } The father of the gods his glory shrouds,
Involved in tempests, and a night of clouds;
And, from the middle darkness flashing out,
By fits he deals his fiery bolts about.
Earth feels the motions of her angry god; } Her entrails tremble, and her mountains nod, } And flying beasts in forests seek abode: } Deep horror seizes every human breast;
Their pride is humbled, and their fear confessed,
While he from high his rolling thunder throws,
And fires the mountains with repeated blows:
The rocks are from their old foundations rent;
The winds redouble, and the rains augment:
The waves on heaps are dashed against the shore;
And now the woods, and now the billows, roar.
In fear of this, observe the starry signs,
Where Saturn houses, and where Hermes joins.
But first to heaven thy due devotions pay,
And annual gifts on Ceres' altars lay.
When winter's rage abates, when cheerful hours
Awake the spring, and spring awakes the flowers,
On the green turf thy careless limbs display,
And celebrate the mighty Mother's day;
For then the hills with pleasing shades are crowned,
And sleeps are sweeter on the silken ground:
With milder beams the sun securely shines;[10]
Fat are the lambs, and luscious are the wines.
Let every swain adore her power divine,
And milk and honey mix with sparkling wine:
Let all the choir of clowns attend the show,
In long procession, shouting as they go;
Invoking her to bless their yearly stores,
Inviting plenty to their crowded floors.
Thus in the spring, and thus in summer's heat,
Before the sickles touch the ripening wheat,
On Ceres call; and let the labouring hind
With oaken wreaths his hollow temples bind:
On Ceres let him call, and Ceres praise,
With uncouth dances, and with country lays.
And that by certain signs we may presage
Of heats and rains, and wind's impetuous rage,
The Sovereign of the heavens has set on high
The moon, to mark the changes of the sky;
When southern blasts should cease, and when the swain
Should near their folds his feeding flocks restrain.
For, ere the rising winds begin to roar,
The working seas advance to wash the shore;
Soft whispers run along the leafy woods,
And mountains whistle to the murmuring floods.
Even then the doubtful billows scarce abstain
From the tossed vessel on the troubled main;
When crying cormorants forsake the sea,
And, stretching to the covert, wing their way;
When sportful coots run skimming o'er the strand;
When watchful herons leave their watery stand,
And, mounting upward with erected flight,
Gain on the skies, and soar above the sight.
And oft, before tempestuous winds arise,
The seeming stars fall headlong from the skies,
And, shooting through the darkness, gild the night
With sweeping glories, and long trails of light;
And chaff with eddy-winds is whirled around,
And dancing leaves are lifted from the ground;
And floating feathers on the waters play.
But, when the winged thunder takes his way
From the cold north, and east and west engage,
And at their frontiers meet with equal rage,
The clouds are crushed; a glut of gathered rain } The hollow ditches fills, and floats the plain; } And sailors furl their dropping sheets amain. } Wet weather seldom hurts the most unwise;
So plain the signs, such prophets are the skies.
The wary crane foresees it first, and sails
Above the storm, and leaves the lowly vales;
The cow looks up, and from afar can find
The change of heaven, and snuffs it in the wind;
The swallow skims the river's watery face;
The frogs renew the croaks of their loquacious race;
The careful ant her secret cell forsakes,
And drags her eggs along the narrow tracks:
At either horn the rainbow drinks the flood; } Huge flocks of rising rooks forsake their food, } And, crying, seek the shelter of the wood. } Besides, the several sorts of watery fowls,
That swim the seas, or haunt the standing pools,
The swans that sail along the silver flood,
And dive with stretching necks to search their food,
Then lave their backs with sprinkling dews in vain,
And stem the stream to meet the promised rain.
The crow with clamorous cries the shower demands,
And single stalks along the desert sands.
The nightly virgin, while her wheel she plies,
Foresees the storm impending in the skies,
When sparkling lamps their sputtering light advance,
And in the sockets oily bubbles dance.
Then, after showers, 'tis easy to descry
Returning suns, and a serener sky:
The stars shine smarter; and the moon adorns,
As with unborrowed beams, her sharpened horns.
The filmy gossamer now flits no more,
Nor halcyons bask on the short sunny shore:
Their litter is not tossed by sows unclean;
But a blue droughty mist descends upon the plain;
And owls, that mark the setting sun, declare
A star-light evening, and a morning fair.
Towering aloft, avenging Nisus flies,
While, dared, below the guilty Scylla lies.
Wherever frighted Scylla flies away,
Swift Nisus follows, and pursues his prey:
Where injured Nisus takes his airy course,
Thence trembling Scylla flies, and shuns his force.
This punishment pursues the unhappy maid,
And thus the purple hair is dearly paid:
Then, thrice the ravens rend the liquid air,
And croaking notes proclaim the settled fair.
Then round their airy palaces they fly,
To greet the sun; and, seized with secret joy,
When storms are over-blown, with food repair
To their forsaken nests, and callow care.
Not that I think their breasts with heavenly souls
Inspired, as man, who destiny controls;
But, with the changeful temper of the skies,
As rains condense, and sunshine rarefies,
So turn the species in their altered minds,
Composed by calms, and discomposed by winds.
From hence proceeds the birds' harmonious voice;
From hence the cows exult, and frisking lambs rejoice.
Observe the daily circle of the sun,
And the short year of each revolving moon:
By them thou shalt foresee the following day,
Nor shall a starry night thy hopes betray.
When first the moon appears, if then she shrouds
Her silver crescent tipped with sable clouds,
Conclude she bodes a tempest on the main,
And brews for fields impetuous floods of rain.
Or, if her face with fiery flushing glow,
Expect the rattling winds aloft to blow.
But, four nights old, (for that's the surest sign,)
With sharpened horns if glorious then she shine,
Next day, nor only that, but all the moon,
'Till her revolving race be wholly run,
Are void of tempests, both by land and sea,
And sailors in the port their promised vow shall pay.
Above the rest, the sun, who never lies,
Foretells the change of weather in the skies:
For, if he rise unwilling to his race,
Clouds on his brow, and spots upon his face,
Or if through mists he shoots his sullen beams,
Frugal of light, in loose and straggling streams;
Suspect a drizzling day, with southern rain,
Fatal to fruits, and flocks, and promised grain.
Or if Aurora, with half-opened eyes,
And a pale sickly cheek, salute the skies;
How shall the vine, with tender leaves, defend
Her teeming clusters, when the storms descend,
When ridgy roofs and tiles can scarce avail
To bar the ruin of the rattling hail?
But, more than all, the setting sun survey,
When down the steep of heaven he drives the day:
For oft we find him finishing his race,
With various colours erring on his face.
If fiery red his glowing globe descends,
High winds and furious tempests he portends:
But, if his cheeks are swoln with livid blue,
He bodes wet weather by his watery hue:
If dusky spots are varied on his brow,
And, streaked with red, a troubled colour show;
That sullen mixture shall at once declare
Winds, rain, and storms, and elemental war.
What desperate madman then would venture o'er
The frith, or haul his cables from the shore?
But, if with purple rays he brings the light,
And a pure heaven resigns to quiet night,
No rising winds, or falling storms, are nigh; } But northern breezes through the forest fly, } And drive the rack, and purge the ruffled sky. } The unerring sun by certain signs declares,
What the late even or early morn prepares,
And when the south projects a stormy day,
And when the clearing north will puff the clouds away.
The sun reveals the secrets of the sky;
And who dares give the source of light the lie?
The change of empires often he declares,
Fierce tumults, hidden treasons, open wars.
He first the fate of Cæsar did foretell,
And pitied Rome, when Rome in Cæsar fell;
In iron clouds concealed the public light,
And impious mortals feared eternal night.
Nor was the fact foretold by him alone,—
Nature herself stood forth, and seconded the sun.
Earth, air, and seas, with prodigies were signed;
And birds obscene, and howling dogs, divined.
What rocks did Ætna's bellowing mouth expire
From her torn entrails! and what floods of fire!
What clanks were heard, in German skies afar,
Of arms, and armies rushing to the war!
Dire earthquakes rent the solid Alps below,
And from their summits shook the eternal snow;
Pale spectres in the close of night were seen,
And voices heard, of more than mortal men,
In silent groves: dumb sheep and oxen spoke;
And streams ran backward, and their beds forsook:
The yawning earth disclosed the abyss of hell, } The weeping statues did the wars foretell, } And holy sweat from brazen idols fell. } Then, rising in his might, the king of floods
Rushed through the forests, tore the lofty woods,
And, rolling onward, with a sweepy sway,
Bore houses, herds, and labouring hinds away.
Blood sprang from wells, wolves howled in towns by night,
And boding victims did the priests affright.
Such peals of thunder never poured from high,
Nor forky lightnings flashed from such a sullen sky.
Red meteors ran across the etherial space;
Stars disappeared, and comets took their place.
For this, the Emathian plains once more were strowed } With Roman bodies, and just heaven thought good } To fatten twice those fields with Roman blood. } Then, after length of time, the labouring swains,
Who turn the turfs of those unhappy plains,
Shall rusty piles from the ploughed furrows take,
And over empty helmets pass the rake—
Amazed at antique titles on the stones,
And mighty reliques of gigantic bones.
Ye home-born deities, of mortal birth!
Thou father Romulus, and mother Earth,
Goddess unmoved! whose guardian arms extend
O'er Tuscan Tyber's course, and Roman towers defend;
With youthful Cæsar your joint powers engage,
Nor hinder him to save the sinking age.
O! let the blood, already spilt, atone
For the past crimes of cursed Laomedon!
Heaven wants thee there; and long the gods, we know,
Have grudged thee, Cæsar, to the world below,
Where fraud and rapine right and wrong confound, } Where impious arms from every part resound, } And monstrous crimes in every shape are crowned. } The peaceful peasant to the wars is pressed;
The fields lie fallow in inglorious rest;
The plain no pasture to the flock affords;
The crooked scythes are straightened into swords:
And there Euphrates her soft offspring arms,
And here the Rhine rebellows with alarms;
The neighbouring cities range on several sides, } Perfidious Mars long-plighted leagues divides, } And o'er the wasted world in triumph rides. } So four fierce coursers, starting to the race,
Scour through the plain, and lengthen every pace;
Nor reins, nor curbs, nor threatening cries, they fear,
But force along the trembling charioteer.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] The poetry of this book is more sublime than any part of Virgil, if I have any taste. And if ever I have copied his majestic style, it is here. The compliment he makes Augustus, almost in the beginning, is ill imitated by his successors, Lucan and Statius. They dedicated to tyrants; and their flatteries are gross and fulsome. Virgil's address is both more lofty and more just. In the three last lines of this Georgic, I think I have discovered a secret compliment to the emperor, which none of the commentators have observed. Virgil had just before described the miseries which Rome had undergone betwixt the triumvirs and the commonwealth party: in the close of all, he seems to excuse the crimes committed by his patron Cæsar, as if he were constrained, against his own temper, to those violent proceedings, by the necessity of the times in general, but more particularly by his two partners, Antony and Lepidus,

Fertur equis auriga, neque audit currus habenas.

They were the head-strong horses, who hurried Octavius, the trembling charioteer, along, and were deaf to his reclaiming them. I observe, farther, that the present wars, in which all Europe, and part of Asia, are engaged at present, are waged in the same places here described:

Hinc movet Euphrates, illinc Germania, bellum, &c.

as if Virgil had prophesied of this age.

[5] Dr Carey reads ear. I have not disturbed the text, though his conjecture is ingenious.

[6] Restored by Dr Carey. The first and second editions have other.

[7] First edit. Argos; restored by Dr Carey.

[8] Southern, according to the earlier editions; but, as Dr Carey observes, this must be a mistake of the pen or press.

[9] Dr Carey places a comma after skies, and thus makes come the preterite participle, instead of the verb in the present tense. But I have followed Dryden's punctuation, which gives a plain meaning.

[10] Dr Carey reads serenely, but there is no occasion to disturb the text. The word securely, though bold, is poetical, and implies the reliance which the husbandman places upon the steady and serene radiance of the sun.

GEORGICS,
BOOK II.

ARGUMENT.

The subject of the following book is planting: in handling of which argument, the poet shews all the different methods of raising trees describes their variety, and gives rules for the management of each in particular. He then points out the soils in which the several plants thrive best, and thence takes occasion to run out into the praises of Italy: after which, he gives some directions for discovering the nature of every soil, prescribes rules for dressing of vines, olives, &c. and concludes the Georgic with a panegyric on a country life.[11]

Thus far of tillage, and of heavenly signs:
Now sing, my Muse, the growth of generous vines,
The shady groves, the woodland progeny,
And the slow product of Minerva's tree.
Great father Bacchus! to my song repair;
For clustering grapes are thy peculiar care:
For thee, large bunches load the bending vine,
And the last blessings of the year are thine.
To thee his joys the jolly autumn owes,
When the fermenting juice the vat o'erflows.
Come, strip with me, my god! come drench all o'er
Thy limbs in must of wine, and drink at every pore.
Some trees their birth to bounteous Nature owe;
For some, without the pains of planting, grow.
With osiers thus the banks of brooks abound,
Sprung from the watery genius of the ground.
From the same principles grey willows come,
Herculean poplar, and the tender broom.
But some, from seeds inclosed in earth, arise;
For thus the mastful chesnut mates the skies.
Hence rise the branching beech and vocal oak,
Where Jove of old oraculously spoke.
Some from the root a rising wood disclose:
Thus elms, and thus the savage cherry grows:
Thus the green bay, that binds the poet's brows,
Shoots, and is sheltered by the mother's boughs.
These ways of planting Nature did ordain,
For trees and shrubs, and all the sylvan reign.
Others there are, by late experience found:
Some cut the shoots, and plant in furrowed ground;
Some cover rooted stalks in deeper mould;
Some, cloven stakes; and (wonderous to behold!)
Their sharpened ends in earth their footing place;
And the dry poles produce a living race.
Some bow their vines, which buried in the plain,
Their tops in distant arches rise again.
Others no root require; the labourer cuts
Young slips, and in the soil securely puts.
Even stumps of olives, bared of leaves, and dead,
Revive, and oft redeem their withered head.
'Tis usual now an inmate graff to see
With insolence invade a foreign tree:
Thus pears and quinces from the crabtree come,
And thus the ruddy cornel bears the plum.
Then let the learned gardener mark with care
The kinds of stocks, and what those kinds will bear;
Explore the nature of each several tree,
And, known, improve with artful industry:
And let no spot of idle earth be found,
But cultivate the genius of the ground:
For open Ismarus will Bacchus please;
Taburnus loves the shade of olive-trees.
The virtues of the several soils I sing.—
Mæcenas, now thy needful succour bring!
O thou! the better part of my renown,
Inspire thy poet, and thy poem crown:
Embark with me, while I new tracts explore,
With flying sails and breezes from the shore:
Not that my song, in such a scanty space,
So large a subject fully can embrace—
Not though I were supplied with iron lungs,
A hundred mouths, filled with as many tongues:
But steer my vessel with a steady hand,
And coast along the shore in sight of land.
Nor will I tire thy patience with a train
Of preface, or what ancient poets feign.
The trees, which of themselves advance in air,
Are barren kinds, but strongly built and fair,
Because the vigour of the native earth
Maintains the plant, and makes a manly birth.
Yet these, receiving graffs of other kind,
Or thence transplanted, change their savage mind,
Their wildness lose, and, quitting nature's part,
Obey the rules and discipline of art.
The same do trees, that, sprung from barren roots,
In open fields transplanted bear their fruits.
For, where they grow, the native energy
Turns all into the substance of the tree,
Starves and destroys the fruit, is only made
For brawny bulk, and for a barren shade.
The plant that shoots from seed, a sullen tree,
At leisure grows, for late posterity;
The generous flavour lost, the fruits decay,
And savage grapes are made the birds' ignoble prey.
Much labour is required in trees, to tame
Their wild disorder, and in ranks reclaim.
Well must the ground be digged, and better dressed,
New soil to make, and meliorate the rest.
Old stakes of olive-trees in plants revive; }
By the same method Paphian myrtles live; }
But nobler vines by propagation thrive. }
From roots hard hazels, and from cions, rise;
Tall ash, and taller oak that mates the skies;
Palm, poplar, fir, descending from the steep
Of hills, to try the dangers of the deep.
The thin-leaved arbute hazel-graffs receives;
And planes huge apples bear, that bore but leaves.
Thus mastful beech the bristly chesnut bears,
And the wild ash is white with blooming pears,
And greedy swine from grafted elms are fed
With falling acorns, that on oaks are bred.
But various are the ways to change the state
Of plants, to bud, to graff, to inoculate.
For, where the tender rinds of trees disclose
Their shooting gems, a swelling knot there grows;
Just in that space a narrow slit we make,
Then other buds from bearing trees we take;
Inserted thus, the wounded rind we close,
In whose moist womb the admitted infant grows.
But, when the smoother bole from knots is free,
We make a deep incision in the tree,
And in the solid wood the slip inclose;
The batt'ning bastard shoots again and grows;
And in short space the laden boughs arise,
With happy fruit advancing to the skies.
The mother plant admires the leaves unknown
Of alien trees, and apples not her own.
Of vegetable woods are various kinds,
And the same species are of several minds.
Lotes, willows, elms, have different forms allowed;
So funeral cypress, rising like a shrowd.
Fat olive-trees of sundry sorts appear,
Of sundry shapes their unctuous berries bear.
Radii long olives, Orchites round produce,
And bitter Pausia, pounded for the juice.
Alcinoüs' orchard various apples bears:
Unlike are bergamots and pounder pears.
Nor our Italian vines produce the shape,
Or taste, or flavour, of the Lesbian grape.
The Thasian vines in richer soils abound;
The Mareotic grow in barren ground.
The Psythian grape we dry: Lagean juice
Will stammering tongues and staggering feet produce.
Rath ripe are some, and some of later kind,
Of golden some, and some of purple rind.
How shall I praise the Rhætian grape divine,
Which yet contends not with Falernian wine?
The Aminean many a consulship survives,
And longer than the Lydian vintage lives,
Or high Phanæus, king of Chian growth:
But, for large quantities and lasting, both,
The less Argitis bears the prize away.
The Rhodian, sacred to the solemn day,
In second services is poured to Jove,
And best accepted by the gods above.
Nor must Bumastus his old honours lose,
In length and largeness like the dugs of cows.
I pass the rest, whose every race, and name,
And kinds, are less material to my theme;
Which who would learn, as soon may tell the sands,
Driven by the western wind on Libyan lands,
Or number, when the blustering Eurus roars,
The billows beating on Ionian shores.
Nor every plant on every soil will grow:
The sallow loves the watery ground, and low;
The marshes, alders: Nature seems to ordain
The rocky cliff for the wild ashes reign;
The baleful yew to northern blasts assigns,
To shores the myrtles, and to mounts the vines.
Regard the extremest cultivated coast,
From hot Arabia to the Scythian frost:
All sorts of trees their several countries know; }
Black ebon only will in India grow, }
And odorous frankincense on the Sabæan bough. }
Balm slowly trickles through the bleeding veins
Of happy shrubs in Idumæan plains.
The green Egyptian thorn, for medicine good,
With Æthiops' hoary trees and woolly wood,
Let others tell; and how the Seres spin
Their fleecy forests in a slender twine;
With mighty trunks of trees on Indian shores,
Whose height above the feathered arrow soars,
Shot from the toughest bow, and, by the brawn
Of expert archers, with vast vigour drawn.
Sharp-tasted citrons Median climes produce,
(Bitter the rind, but generous is the juice,)
A cordial fruit, a present antidote
Against the direful stepdame's deadly draught,
Who, mixing wicked weeds with words impure,
The fate of envied orphans would procure.
Large is the plant, and like a laurel grows,
And, did it not a different scent disclose,
A laurel were: the fragrant flowers contemn
The stormy winds, tenacious of their stem.
With this, the Medes to labouring age bequeath
New lungs, and cure the sourness of the breath.
But neither Median woods, (a plenteous land,)
Fair Ganges, Hermus rolling golden sand,
Nor Bactria, nor the richer Indian fields,
Nor all the gummy stores Arabia yields,
Nor any foreign earth of greater name, }
Can with sweet Italy contend in fame. }
No bulls, whose nostrils breathe a living flame, }
Have turned our turf; no teeth of serpents here
Were sown, an armed host and iron crop to bear.
But fruitful vines, and the fat olive's freight,
And harvests heavy with their fruitful weight,
Adorn our fields; and on the cheerful green
The grazing flocks and lowing herds are seen.
The warrior horse, here bred, is taught to train:
There flows Clitumnus through the flowery plain,
Whose waves, for triumphs after prosperous war,
The victim ox and snowy sheep prepare.
Perpetual spring our happy climate sees: }
Twice breed the cattle, and twice bear the trees; }
And summer suns recede by slow degrees. }
Our land is from the rage of tigers freed,
Nor nourishes the lion's angry seed;
Nor poisonous aconite is here produced,
Or grows unknown, or is, when known, refused;
Nor in so vast a length our serpents glide,
Or raised on such a spiry volume ride.
Next add our cities of illustrious name,
Their costly labour, and stupendous frame;
Our forts on steepy hills, that far below
See wanton streams in winding valleys flow;
Our twofold seas, that, washing either side,
A rich recruit of foreign stores provide;
Our spacious lakes; thee, Larius, first; and next
Benacus, with tempestuous billows vexed.
Or shall I praise thy ports, or mention make
Of the vast mound that binds the Lucrine lake?
Or the disdainful sea, that, shut from thence,
Roars round the structure, and invades the fence,
There, where secure the Julian waters glide,
Or where Avernus' jaws admit the Tyrrhene tide?
Our quarries, deep in earth, were famed of old
For veins of silver, and for ore of gold.
The inhabitants themselves their country grace:
Hence rose the Marsian and Sabellian race,
Strong-limbed and stout, and to the wars inclined,
And hard Ligurians, a laborious kind,
And Volscians armed with iron-headed darts.
Besides—an offspring of undaunted hearts—
The Decii, Marii, great Camillus, came
From hence, and greater Scipio's double name,
And mighty Cæsar, whose victorious arms
To farthest Asia carry fierce alarms,
Avert unwarlike Indians from his Rome,
Triumph abroad, secure our peace at home.
Hail, sweet Saturnian soil! of fruitful grain
Great parent, greater of illustrious men!
For thee my tuneful accents will I raise,
And treat of arts disclosed in ancient days,
Once more unlock for thee the sacred spring,
And old Ascræan verse in Roman cities sing.
The nature of the several soils now see,
Their strength, their colour, their fertility:
And first for heath, and barren hilly ground,
Where meagre clay and flinty stones abound,
Where the poor soil all succour seems to want—
Yet this suffices the Palladian plant.
Undoubted signs of such a soil are found; }
For here wild olive-shoots o'erspread the ground, }
And heaps of berries strew the fields around. }
But, where the soil, with fattening moisture filled,
Is clothed with grass, and fruitful to be tilled,
Such as in cheerful vales we view from high,
Which dripping rocks with rolling streams supply,
And feed with ooze; where rising hillocks run
In length, and open to the southern sun;
Where fern succeeds, ungrateful to the plough—
That gentle ground to generous grapes allow.
Strong stocks of vines it will in time produce,
And overflow the vats with friendly juice,
Such as our priests in golden goblets pour
To gods, the givers of the cheerful hour,
Then when the bloated Tuscan blows his horn,
And reeking entrails are in chargers borne.
If herds or fleecy flocks be more thy care,
Or goats that graze the field, and burn it bare,
Then seek Tarentum's lawns, and farthest coast,
Or such a field as hapless Mantua lost,
Where silver swans sail down the watery road,
And graze the floating herbage of the flood.
There crystal streams perpetual tenor keep,
Nor food nor springs are wanting to thy sheep;
For, what the day devours, the nightly dew
Shall to the morn in pearly drops renew.
Fat crumbling earth is fitter for the plough,
Putrid and loose above, and black below;
For ploughing is an imitative toil,
Resembling nature in an easy soil.
No land for seed like this; no fields afford
So large an income to the village lord:
No toiling teams from harvest-labour come
So late at night, so heavy-laden home.
The like of forest land is understood, }
From whence the surly ploughman grubs the wood, }
Which had for length of ages idle stood. }
Then birds forsake the ruins of their seat,
And, flying from their nests, their callow young forget.
The coarse lean gravel, on the mountain-sides,
Scarce dewy beverage for the bees provides;
Nor chalk nor crumbling stones, the food of snakes,
That work in hollow earth their winding tracks.
The soil exhaling clouds of subtile dews,
Imbibing moisture which with ease she spews,
Which rusts not iron, and whose mould is clean,
Well clothed with cheerful grass, and ever green,
Is good for olives, and aspiring vines,
Embracing husband elms in amorous twines;
Is fit for feeding cattle, fit to sow,
And equal to the pasture and the plough.
Such is the soil of fat Campanian fields;
Such large increase the land that joins Vesuvius yields;
And such a country could Acerræ boast,
Till Clanius overflowed the unhappy coast.
I teach thee next the differing soils to know,
The light for vines, the heavier for the plough.
Chuse first a place for such a purpose fit:
There dig the solid earth, and sink a pit;
Next fill the hole with its own earth again,
And trample with thy feet, and tread it in:
Then, if it rise not to the former height
Of superfice, conclude that soil is light,
A proper ground for pasturage and vines.
But, if the sullen earth, so pressed, repines
Within its native mansion to retire,
And stays without, a heap of heavy mire,
'Tis good for arable, a glebe that asks
Tough teams of oxen, and laborious tasks.
Salt earth and bitter are not fit to sow,
Nor will be tamed or mended by the plough.
Sweet grapes degenerate there; and fruits, declined
From their first flavorous taste, renounce their kind.
This truth by sure experiment is tried;
For first an osier colander provide
Of twigs thick wrought, (such toiling peasants twine,
When through strait passages they strain their wine:)
In this close vessel place that earth accursed,
But filled brimfull with wholesome water first;
Then run it through; the drops will rope around,
And, by the bitter taste, disclose the ground.
The fatter earth by handling we may find,
With ease distinguished from the meagre kind:
Poor soil will crumble into dust; the rich
Will to the fingers cleave like clammy pitch:
Moist earth produces corn and grass, but both
Too rank and too luxuriant in their growth.
Let not my land so large a promise boast,
Lest the lank ears in length of stem be lost.
The heavier earth is by her weight betrayed;
The lighter in the poising hand is weighed.
'Tis easy to distinguish by the sight,
The colour of the soil, and black from white.
But the cold ground is difficult to know; }
Yet this the plants, that prosper there, will show— }
Black ivy, pitch-trees, and the baleful yew. }
These rules considered well, with early care
The vineyard destined for thy vines prepare:
But, long before the planting, dig the ground,
With furrows deep that cast a rising mound.
The clods, exposed to winter winds, will bake;
For putrid earth will best in vineyards take;
And hoary frosts, after the painful toil
Of delving hinds, will rot the mellow soil.
Some peasants, not to omit the nicest care,
Of the same soil their nursery prepare,
With that of their plantation; lest the tree,
Translated, should not with the soil agree.
Beside, to plant it as it was, they mark
The heaven's four quarters on the tender bark,
And to the north or south restore the side,
Which at their birth did heat or cold abide:
So strong is custom; such effects can use
In tender souls of pliant plants produce.
Chuse next a province for thy vineyard's reign,
On hills above, or in the lowly plain.
If fertile fields or valleys be thy choice,
Plant thick; for bounteous Bacchus will rejoice
In close plantations there; but, if the vine
On rising ground be placed, or hills supine,
Extend thy loose battalions largely wide,
Opening thy ranks and files on either side,
But marshalled all in order as they stand;
And let no soldier straggle from his band.
As legions in the field their front display,
To try the fortune of some doubtful day,
And move to meet their foes with sober pace,
Strict to their figure, though in wider space,
Before the battle joins, while from afar
The field yet glitters with the pomp of war,
And equal Mars, like an impartial lord,
Leaves all to fortune, and the dint of sword—
So let thy vines in intervals be set,
But not their rural discipline forget;
Indulge their width, and add a roomy space,
That their extremest lines may scarce embrace;
Nor this alone to indulge a vain delight,
And make a pleasing prospect for the sight;
But, for the ground itself, this only way }
Can equal vigour to the plants convey, }
Which, crowded, want the room, their branches to display. }
How deep they must be planted, would'st thou know?
In shallow furrows vines securely grow.
Not so the rest of plants; for Jove's own tree,
That holds the woods in awful sovereignty,
Requires a depth of lodging in the ground,
And, next the lower skies, a bed profound:
High as his topmost boughs to heaven ascend,
So low his roots to hell's dominion tend.
Therefore, nor winds, nor winter's rage o'erthrows
His bulky body, but unmoved he grows;
For length of ages lasts his happy reign,
And lives of mortal man contend in vain.
Full in the midst of his own strength he stands, }
Stretching his brawny arms, and leafy hands; }
His shade protects the plains, his head the hills commands. }
The hurtful hazel in thy vineyard shun;
Nor plant it to receive the setting sun;
Nor break the topmost branches from the tree;
Nor prune, with blunted knife, the progeny.
Root up wild olives from thy laboured lands;
For sparkling fire, from hinds' unwary hands,
Is often scattered o'er their unctuous rinds,
And after spread abroad by raging winds:
For first the smouldering flame the trunk receives;
Ascending thence, it crackles in the leaves;
At length victorious to the top aspires,
Involving all the wood in smoky fires;
But most, when, driven by winds, the flaming storm
Of the long files destroys the beauteous form.
In ashes then the unhappy vineyard lies;
Nor will the blasted plants from ruin rise;
Nor will the withered stock be green again;
But the wild olive shoots, and shades the ungrateful plain.
Be not seduced with wisdom's empty shows,
To stir the peaceful ground when Boreas blows.
When winter frosts constrain the field with cold,
The fainty root can take no steady hold.
But, when the golden spring reveals the year,
And the white bird returns, whom serpents fear,
That season deem the best to plant thy vines:
Next that, is when autumnal warmth declines,
Ere heat is quite decayed, or cold begun,
Or Capricorn admits the winter sun.
The spring adorns the woods, renews the leaves;
The womb of earth the genial seed receives:
For then almighty Jove descends, and pours
Into his buxom bride his fruitful showers;
And, mixing his large limbs with hers, he feeds
Her births with kindly juice, and fosters teeming seeds.
Then joyous birds frequent the lonely grove,
And beasts, by nature stung, renew their love.
Then fields the blades of buried corn disclose; }
And, while the balmy western spirit blows, }
Earth to the breath her bosom dares expose. }
With kindly moisture then the plants abound;
The grass securely springs above the ground;
The tender twig shoots upward to the skies,
And on the faith of the new sun relies.
The swerving vines on the tall elms prevail;
Unhurt by southern showers, or northern hail,
They spread their gems, the genial warmth to share,
And boldly trust their buds in open air.
In this soft season, (let me dare to sing,) }
The world was hatched by heaven's imperial king— }
In prime of all the year, and holidays of spring. }
Then did the new creation first appear;
Nor other was the tenor of the year,
When laughing heaven did the great birth attend;
And eastern winds their wintery breath suspend:
Then sheep first saw the sun in open fields;
And savage beasts were sent to stock the wilds;
And golden stars flew up to light the skies;
And man's relentless race from stony quarries rise.
Nor could the tender new creation bear
The excessive heats or coldness of the year,
But, chilled by winter, or by summer fired,
The middle temper of the spring required,
When warmth and moisture did at once abound,
And heaven's indulgence brooded on the ground.
For what remains, in depth of earth secure
Thy covered plants, and dung with hot manure;
And shells and gravel in the ground inclose;
For through their hollow chinks the water flows,
Which, thus imbibed, returns in misty dews,
And, steaming up, the rising plant renews.
Some husbandmen, of late, have found the way, }
A hilly heap of stones above to lay, }
And press the plants with shards of potters' clay. }
This fence against immoderate rain they found,
Or when the Dog-star cleaves the thirsty ground.
Be mindful, when thou hast entombed the shoot,
With store of earth around to feed the root;
With iron teeth of rakes and prongs, to move
The crusted earth, and loosen it above.
Then exercise thy sturdy steers to plough
Betwixt thy vines, and teach the feeble row
To mount on reeds, and wands, and, upward led,
On ashen poles to raise their forky head.
On these new crutches let them learn to walk,
Till, swerving upwards with a stronger stalk,
They brave the winds, and, clinging to their guide,
On tops of elms at length triumphant ride.
But, in their tender nonage, while they spread
Their springing leaves, and lift their infant head,
And upward while they shoot in open air,
Indulge their childhood, and the nurselings spare;
Nor exercise thy rage on new-born life;
But let thy hand supply the pruning-knife,
And crop luxuriant stragglers, nor be loth
To strip the branches of their leafy growth.
But, when the rooted vines, with steady hold,
Can clasp their elms, then, husbandman, be bold
To lop the disobedient boughs, that strayed
Beyond their ranks; let crooked steel invade
The lawless troops, which discipline disclaim,
And their superfluous growth with rigour tame.
Next, fenced with hedges and deep ditches round,
Exclude the encroaching cattle from thy ground,
While yet the tender gems but just appear,
Unable to sustain the uncertain year;
Whose leaves are not alone foul winter's prey,
But oft by summer suns are scorched away,
And, worse than both, become the unworthy browze }
Of buffaloes, salt goats, and hungry cows. }
For not December's frost, that burns the boughs, }
Nor dog-days' parching heat, that splits the rocks, }
Are half so harmful as the greedy flocks, }
Their venomed bite, and scars indented on the stocks. }
For this, the malefactor goat was laid
On Bacchus' altar, and his forfeit paid.
At Athens thus old comedy began,
When round the streets the reeling actors ran,
In country villages, and crossing ways,
Contending for the prizes of their plays;
And, glad with Bacchus, on the grassy soil,
Leaped o'er the skins of goats besmeared with oil.
Thus Roman youth, derived from ruined Troy,
In rude Saturnian rhymes express their joy;
With taunts, and laughter loud, their audience please,
Deformed with vizards, cut from barks of trees:
In jolly hymns they praise the god of wine, }
Whose earthen images adorn the pine, }
And there are hung on high, in honour of the vine. }
A madness so devout the vineyard fills;
In hollow valleys and on rising hills,
On whate'er side he turns his honest face,
And dances in the wind, those fields are in his grace.
To Bacchus therefore let us tune our lays,
And in our mother tongue resound his praise.
Thin cakes in chargers, and a guilty goat,
Dragged by the horns, be to his altars brought;
Whose offered entrails shall his crime reproach,
And drip their fatness from the hazel broach.
To dress thy vines, new labour is required;
Nor must the painful husbandman be tired:
For thrice, at least, in compass of the year,
Thy vineyard must employ the sturdy steer
To turn the glebe, besides thy daily pain
To break the clods, and make the surface plain,
To unload the branches, or the leaves to thin,
That suck the vital moisture of the vine.
Thus in a circle runs the peasant's pain,
And the year rolls within itself again.
Even in the lowest months, when storms have shed
From vines the hairy honours of their head,
Not then the drudging hind his labour ends,
But to the coming year his care extends.
Even then the naked vine he persecutes;
His pruning knife at once reforms and cuts.
Be first to dig the ground; be first to burn
The branches lopt; and first the props return
Into thy house, that bore the burdened vines;
But last to reap the vintage of thy wines.
Twice in the year luxuriant leaves o'ershade
The encumbered vine; rough brambles twice invade:
Hard laboured both! Commend the large excess
Of spacious vineyards; cultivate the less.
Besides, in woods the shrubs of prickly thorn,
Sallows and reeds on banks of rivers born,
Remain to cut; for vineyards useful found, }
To stay thy vines, and fence thy fruitful ground. }
Nay,[12] when thy tender trees at length are bound, }
When peaceful vines from pruning-hooks are free, }
When husbands have surveyed the last degree, }
And utmost files of plants, and ordered every tree; }
Even when they sing at ease in full content,
Insulting o'er the toils they underwent,
Yet still they find a future task remain,
To turn the soil, and break the clods again;
And, after all, their joys are unsincere,
While falling rains on ripening grapes they fear.
Quite opposite to these are olives found:
No dressing they require, and dread no wound,
Nor rakes nor harrows need; but, fixed below,
Rejoice in open air, and unconcernedly grow.
The soil itself due nourishment supplies:
Plough but the furrows, and the fruits arise,
Content with small endeavours, till they spring. }
Soft peace they figure, and sweet plenty bring; }
Then olives plant, and hymns to Pallas sing. }
Thus apple-trees, whose trunks are strong to bear
Their spreading boughs, exert themselves in air,
Want no supply, but stand secure alone, }
Not trusting foreign forces, but their own, }
Till with the ruddy freight the bending branches groan. }
Thus trees of nature, and each common bush,
Uncultivated thrive, and with red berries blush.
Vile shrubs are shorn for browze; the towering height
Of unctuous trees are torches for the night.
And shall we doubt, (indulging easy sloth,)
To sow, to set, and to reform their growth?
To leave the lofty plants—the lowly kind
Are for the shepherd or the sheep designed.
Even humble broom and osiers have their use,
And shade for sheep, and food for flocks, produce;
Hedges for corn, and honey for the bees,
Besides the pleasing prospect of the trees.
How goodly looks Cytorus, ever green
With boxen groves! with what delight are seen
Narycian woods of pitch, whose gloomy shade
Seems for retreat of heavenly Muses made!
But much more pleasing are those fields to see,
That need not ploughs, nor human industry.
Even cold Caucasean rocks with trees are spread,
And wear green forests on their hilly head.
Though bending from the blast of eastern storms,
Though shent their leaves, and shattered are their arms,
Yet heaven their various plants for use designs—
For houses, cedars—and, for shipping, pines—
Cypress provides for spokes and wheels of wains,
And all for keels of ships, that scour the watery plains.
Willows in twigs are fruitful, elms in leaves;
The war, from stubborn myrtle, shafts receives—
From cornels, javelins; and the tougher yew
Receives the bending figure of a bow.
Nor box, nor limes, without their use are made, }
Smooth-grained, and proper for the turner's trade; }
Which curious hands may carve, and steel with ease invade. }
Light alder stems the Po's impetuous tide,
And bees in hollow oaks their honey hide.
Now balance, with these gifts, the fumy joys
Of wine, attended with eternal noise.
Wine urged to lawless lust the Centaurs' train;
Through wine they quarrelled, and through wine were slain.
O happy, if he knew his happy state,
The swain, who, free from business and debate,
Receives his easy food from nature's hand,
And just returns of cultivated land!
No palace, with a lofty gate, he wants,
To admit the tides of early visitants,
With eager eyes devouring, as they pass,
The breathing figures of Corinthian brass.
No statues threaten, from high pedestals;
No Persian arras hides his homely walls,
With antic vests, which, through their shady fold,
Betray the streaks of ill-dissembled gold:
He boasts no wool, whose native white is dyed
With purple poison of Assyrian pride;
No costly drugs of Araby defile,
With foreign scents, the sweetness of his oil:
But easy quiet, a secure retreat,
A harmless life that knows not how to cheat,
With home-bred plenty, the rich owner bless,
And rural pleasures crown his happiness.
Unvexed with quarrels, undisturbed with noise,
The country king his peaceful realm enjoys—
Cool grots, and living lakes, the flowery pride
Of meads, and streams that through the valley glide,
And shady groves that easy sleep invite,
And, after toilsome days, a soft repose at night.
Wild beasts of nature in his woods abound;
And youth, of labour patient, plough the ground,
Inured to hardship, and to homely fare.
Nor venerable age is wanting there,
In great examples to the youthful train;
Nor are the gods adored with rites profane.
From hence Astræa took her flight; and here
The prints of her departing steps appear.
Ye sacred Muses! with whose beauty fired,
My soul is ravished, and my brain inspired—
Whose priest I am, whose holy fillets wear—
Would you your poet's first petition hear;
Give me the ways of wandering stars to know,
The depths of heaven above, and earth below:
Teach me the various labours of the moon,
And whence proceed the eclipses of the sun;
Why flowing tides prevail upon the main,
And in what dark recess they shrink again;
What shakes the solid earth; what cause delays
The summer nights, and shortens winter days.
But, if my heavy blood restrain the flight }
Of my free soul, aspiring to the height }
Of nature, and unclouded fields of light— }
My next desire is, void of care and strife,
To lead a soft, secure, inglorious life—
A country cottage near a crystal flood,
A winding valley, and a lofty wood.
Some god conduct me to the sacred shades,
Where Bacchanals are sung by Spartan maids,
Or lift me high to Hæmus' hilly crown,
Or in the plains of Tempe lay me down,
Or lead me to some solitary place,
And cover my retreat from human race.
Happy the man, who, studying nature's laws,
Through known effects can trace the sacred cause—
His mind possessing in a quiet state,
Fearless of fortune, and resigned to fate!
And happy too is he, who decks the bowers
Of Sylvans, and adores the rural powers—
Whose mind, unmoved, the bribes of courts can see,
Their glittering baits, and purple slavery—
Nor hopes the people's praise, nor fears their frown, }
Nor, when contending kindred tear the crown, }
Will set up one, or pull another down. }
Without concern he hears, but hears from far,
Of tumults, and descents, and distant war;
Nor with a superstitious fear is awed,
For what befalls at home, or what abroad.
Nor envies he the rich their heapy store,
Nor his own peace disturbs with pity for the poor.
He feeds on fruits, which, of their own accord,
The willing ground and laden trees afford.
From his loved home no lucre him can draw; }
The senate's mad decrees he never saw; }
Nor heard, at bawling bars, corrupted law. }
Some to the seas, and some to camps, resort,
And some with impudence invade the court:
In foreign countries, others seek renown;
With wars and taxes, others waste their own,
And houses burn, and household gods deface,
To drink in bowls with glittering gems enchase,
To loll on couches, rich with citron steds,
And lay their guilty limbs in Tyrian beds.
This wretch in earth entombs his golden ore,
Hovering and brooding on his buried store.
Some patriot fools to popular praise aspire
Of public speeches, which worse fools admire,
While, from both benches, with redoubled sounds,
The applause of lords and commoners abounds.
Some, through ambition, or through thirst of gold,
Have slain their brothers, or their country sold,
And, leaving their sweet homes, in exile run
To lands that lie beneath another sun.
The peasant, innocent of all these ills, }
With crooked ploughs the fertile fallows tills, }
And the round year with daily labour fills. }
From hence the country markets are supplied:
Enough remains for household charge beside,
His wife and tender children to sustain.
And gratefully to feed his dumb deserving train.
Nor cease his labours, till the yellow field
A full return of bearded harvest yield—
A crop so plenteous, as the land to load,
O'ercome the crowded barns, and lodge on ricks abroad.
Thus every several season is employed,
Some spent in toil, and some in ease enjoyed.
The yeaning ewes prevent the springing year:
The laded boughs their fruits in autumn bear:
'Tis then the vine her liquid harvest yields,
Baked in the sun-shine of ascending fields.
The winter comes; and then the falling mast
For greedy swine provides a full repast:
Then olives, ground in mills, their fatness boast,
And winter fruits are mellowed by the frost.
His cares are eased with intervals of bliss;
His little children, climbing for a kiss,
Welcome their father's late return at night;
His faithful bed is crowned with chaste delight.
His kine with swelling udders ready stand,
And, lowing for the pail, invite the milker's hand.
His wanton kids, with budding horns prepared,
Fight harmless battles in his homely yard:
Himself, in rustic pomp, on holidays, }
To rural powers a just oblation pays, }
And on the green his careless limbs displays. }
The hearth is in the midst; the herdsmen, round
The cheerful fire, provoke his health in goblets crown'd.
He calls on Bacchus, and propounds the prize; }
The groom his fellow-groom at buts defies, }
And bends his bow, and levels with his eyes; }
Or, stript for wrestling, smears his limbs with oil,
And watches, with a trip his foe to foil.
Such was the life the frugal Sabines led;
So Remus and his brother god were bred,
From whom the austere Etrurian virtue rose;
And this rude life our homely fathers chose.
Old Rome from such a race derived her birth,
(The seat of empire, and the conquered earth,)
Which now on seven high hills triumphant reigns,
And in that compass all the world contains.
Ere Saturn's rebel son usurped the skies,
When beasts were only slain for sacrifice,
While peaceful Crete enjoyed her ancient lord,
Ere sounding hammers forged the inhuman sword,
Ere hollow drums were beat, before the breath
Of brazen trumpets rung the peals of death,
The good old god his hunger did assuage
With roots and herbs, and gave the golden age.
But, over-laboured with so long a course,
'Tis time to set at ease the smoking horse.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] The Praises of Italy, (translated by the learned and every way excellent Mr Chetwood,) which are printed in one of my Miscellany Poems, are the greatest ornament of this book: wherein, for want of sufficient skill in gardening, agriculture, &c. I may possibly be mistaken in some terms. But, concerning grafting, my honoured friend Sir William Bowyer has assured me, that Virgil has shewn more of poetry than skill, at least in relation to our more northern climates; and that many of our stocks will not receive such grafts as our poet tells us would bear in Italy. Nature has conspired with art to make the garden at Denham Court, of Sir William's own plantation, one of the most delicious spots of ground in England: it contains not above five acres (just the compass of Alcinoüs's garden, described in the Odysses:) but Virgil says, in this very Georgic,

----Laudato ingentia rura;
Exiguum colito.

[12] Dryden seems to have left this verse unfinished, for all editions prior to Dr Carey's read Nor. It is probable, he meant to give the sentence a different construction from what it now presents, but, having changed his purpose, forgot to alter the beginning.

GEORGICS.
BOOK III.

ARGUMENT.

This book begins with the invocation of some rural deities, and a compliment to Augustus; after which Virgil directs himself to Mæcenas, and enters on his subject. He lays down rules for the breeding and management of horses, oxen, sheep, goats, and dogs; and interweaves several pleasant descriptions of a chariot-race, of the battle of the bulls, of the force of love, and of the Scythian winter. In the latter part of the book, he relates the diseases incident to cattle; and ends with the description of a fatal murrain that formerly raged among the Alps.

Thy fields, propitious Pales, I rehearse;
And sing thy pastures in no vulgar verse,
Amphrysian shepherd! the Lycæan woods,
Arcadia's flowery plains, and pleasing floods.
All other themes, that careless minds invite,
Are worn with use, unworthy me to write.
Busiris' altars, and the dire decrees
Of hard Eurystheus, every reader sees:
Hylas the boy, Latona's erring isle,
And Pelops' ivory shoulder, and his toil
For fair Hippodame, with all the rest
Of Grecian tales, by poets are expressed.
New ways I must attempt, my grovelling name
To raise aloft, and wing my flight to fame.
I, first of Romans, shall in triumph come
From conquered Greece and bring her trophies home,
With foreign spoils adorn my native place,
And with Idume's palms my Mantua grace.
Of Parian stone a temple will I raise,
Where the slow Mincius through the valley strays,
Where cooling streams invite the flocks to drink,
And reeds defend the winding water's brink.
Full in the midst shall mighty Cæsar stand,
Hold the chief honours, and the dome command.
Then I, conspicuous in my Tyrian gown,
(Submitting to his godhead my renown,)
A hundred coursers from the goal will drive:
The rival chariots in the race shall strive.
All Greece shall flock from far, my games to see;
The whorlbat, and the rapid race, shall be
Reserved for Cæsar, and ordained by me.
Myself, with olive crowned, the gifts will bear.
Even now methinks the public shouts I hear;
The passing pageants, and the pomps appear.
I to the temple will conduct the crew,
The sacrifice and sacrificers view,
From thence return, attended with my train,
Where the proud theatres disclose the scene,
Which interwoven Britons seem to raise,
And shew the triumph which their shame displays.
High o'er the gate, in elephant and gold,
The crowd shall Cæsar's Indian war behold:
The Nile shall flow beneath; and, on the side,
His shattered ships on brazen pillars ride.
Next him Niphates,[13] with inverted urn,
And dropping sedge,[14] shall his Armenia mourn;
And Asian cities in our triumph borne.
With backward bows the Parthians shall be there,
And, spurring from the fight, confess their fear.
A double wreath shall crown our Cæsar's brows—
Two differing trophies, from two different foes.
Europe with Afric in his fame shall join;
But neither shore his conquest[15] shall confine.
The Parian marble there shall seem to move
In breathing statues, not unworthy Jove,
Resembling heroes, whose etherial root
Is Jove himself, and Cæsar is the fruit.
Tros and his race the sculptor shall employ;
And he—the god who built the walls of Troy;
Envy herself at last, grown pale and dumb,
(By Cæsar combated and overcome,)
Shall give her hands, and fear the curling snakes
Of lashing Furies, and the burning lakes;
The pains of famished Tantalus shall feel, }
And Sisyphus, that labours up the hill }
The rolling rock in vain; and curst Ixion's wheel. }
Meantime we must pursue the sylvan lands, }
(The abode of nymphs,) untouched by former hands: }
For such, Mæcenas, are thy hard commands. }
Without thee, nothing lofty can I sing.
Come then, and, with thyself, thy genius bring,
With which inspired, I brook no dull delay: }
Cithæron loudly calls me to my way; }
Thy hounds, Täyg'tus, open, and pursue their prey. }
High Epidaurus urges on my speed,
Famed for his hills, and for his horses' breed:
From hills and dales the cheerful cries rebound;
For Echo hunts along, and propagates the sound.
A time will come, when my maturer Muse,
In Cæsar's wars, a nobler theme shall chuse,
And through more ages bear my sovereign's praise,
Than have from Tithon past to Cæsar's days.
The generous youth, who, studious of the prize,
The race of running coursers multiplies,
Or to the plough the sturdy bullock breeds,
May know, that from the dam the worth of each proceeds.
The mother cow must wear a lowering look,
Sour-headed, strongly necked, to bear the yoke.
Her double dew-lap from her chin descends,
And at her thighs the ponderous burden ends.
Long are her sides and large; her limbs are great;
Rough are her ears, and broad her horny feet.
Her colour shining black, but flecked with white;
She tosses from the yoke; provokes the fight:
She rises in her gait, is free from fears,
And in her face a bull's resemblance bears:
Her ample forehead with a star is crowned,
And with her length of tail she sweeps the ground.
The bull's insult at four she may sustain;
But, after ten, from nuptial rites refrain.
Six seasons use; but then release the cow,
Unfit for love, and for the labouring plough.
Now, while their youth is filled with kindly fire,
Submit thy females to the lusty sire:
Watch the quick motions of the frisking tail; }
Then serve their fury with the rushing male, }
Indulging pleasure, lest the breed should fail. }
In youth alone, unhappy mortals live;
But, ah! the mighty bliss is fugitive:
Discoloured sickness, anxious labours, come,
And age, and death's inexorable doom.
Yearly thy herds in vigour will impair.
Recruit and mend them with thy yearly care:
Still propagate; for still they fall away:
'Tis prudence to prevent the entire decay.
Like diligence requires the courser's race,
In early choice, and for a longer space.
The colt, that for a stallion is designed, }
By sure presages shews his generous kind: }
Of able body, sound of limb and wind, }
Upright he walks, on pasterns firm and straight;
His motions easy; prancing in his gait;
The first to lead the way, to tempt the flood,
To pass the bridge unknown, nor fear the trembling wood;
Dauntless at empty noises; lofty necked;
Sharp-headed, barrel-bellied, broadly backed;
Brawny his chest, and deep; his colour gray; }
For beauty, dappled, or the brightest bay: }
Faint white and dun will scarce the rearing pay. }
The fiery courser, when he hears from far
The sprightly trumpets, and the shouts of war,
Pricks up his ears; and, trembling with delight,
Shifts place, and paws, and hopes the promised fight.
On his right shoulder his thick mane reclined,
Ruffles at speed, and dances in the wind.
His horny hoofs are jetty black and round; }
His chine is double; starting with a bound }
He turns the turf, and shakes the solid ground. }
Fire from his eyes, clouds from his nostrils, flow:
He bears his rider headlong on the foe.
Such was the steed in Grecian poets famed,
Proud Cyllarus, by Spartan Pollux tamed:
Such coursers bore to fight the god of Thrace;
And such, Achilles, was thy warlike race.
In such a shape, grim Saturn did restrain
His heavenly limbs, and flowed with such a mane,
When, half-surprised, and fearing to be seen,
The lecher gallopped from his jealous queen,
Ran up the ridges of the rocks amain,
And with shrill neighings filled the neighbouring plain.
But, worn with years, when dire diseases come,
Then hide his not ignoble age at home,
In peace to enjoy his former palms and pains;
And gratefully be kind to his remains.
For, when his blood no youthful spirits move,
He languishes and labours in his love;
And, when the sprightly seed should swiftly come,
Dribbling he drudges, and defrauds the womb.
In vain he burns, like hasty stubble-fires,
And in himself his former self requires.
His age and courage weigh; nor those alone,
But note his father's virtues and his own:
Observe, if he disdains to yield the prize,
Of loss impatient, proud of victories.
Hast thou beheld, when from the goal they start,
The youthful charioteers with heaving heart
Rush to the race; and, panting, scarcely bear
The extremes of feverish hope and chilling fear;
Stoop to the reins, and lash with all their force?
The flying chariot kindles in the course:
And now alow, and now aloft, they fly,
As borne through air, and seem to touch the sky.
No stop, no stay: but clouds of sand arise,
Spurned, and cast backward on the followers' eyes.
The hindmost blows the foam upon the first:
Such is the love of praise, an honourable thirst.
Bold Erichthonius was the first who joined
Four horses for the rapid race designed,
And o'er the dusty wheels presiding sate:
The Lapithæ, to chariots, add the state
Of bits and bridles: taught the steed to bound,
To run the ring, and trace the mazy round;
To stop, to fly, the rules of war to know;
To obey the rider, and to dare the foe.
To chuse a youthful steed with courage fired,
To breed him, break him, back him, are required
Experienced masters; and, in sundry ways,
Their labours equal, and alike their praise.
But, once again, the battered horse beware:
The weak old stallion will deceive thy care.
Though famous in his youth for force and speed, }
Or was of Argos or Epirian breed, }
Or did from Neptune's race, or from himself, proceed. }
These things premised, when now the nuptial time
Approaches for the stately steed to climb,
With food enable him to make his court;
Distend his chine, and pamper him for sport:
Feed him with herbs, whatever thou canst find,
Of generous warmth, and of salacious kind:
Then water him, and (drinking what he can)
Encourage him to thirst again, with bran.
Instructed thus, produce him to the fair,
And join in wedlock to the longing mare.
For, if the sire be faint, or out of case,
He will be copied in his famished race,
And sink beneath the pleasing task assigned:
(For all's too little for the craving kind.)
As for the females, with industrious care
Take down their mettle; keep them lean and bare:
When conscious of their past delight, and keen
To take the leap, and prove the sport again,
With scanty measure then supply their food;
And, when athirst, restrain them from the flood;
Their bodies harass; sink them when they run;
And fry their melting marrow in the sun.
Starve them, when barns beneath their burden groan,
And winnowed chaff by western winds is blown;
For fear the rankness of the swelling womb
Should scant the passage, and confine the room;
Lest the fat furrows should the sense destroy
Of genial lust, and dull the seat of joy.
But let them suck the seed with greedy force,
And close involve the vigour of the horse.
The male has done:[16] thy care must now proceed
To teeming females, and the promised breed.
First let them run at large, and never know
The taming yoke, or draw the crooked plough.
Let them not leap the ditch, or swim the flood,
Or lumber o'er the meads, or cross the wood;
But range the forest, by the silver side
Of some cool stream, where Nature shall provide
Green grass and fattening clover for their fare, }
And mossy caverns for their noontide lair, }
With rocks above, to shield the sharp nocturnal air. }
About the Alburnian groves, with holly green,
Of winged insects mighty swarms are seen:
This flying plague (to mark its quality)
Œstros the Grecians call—Asylus, we—
A fierce loud-buzzing breeze.—Their stings draw blood,
And drive the cattle gadding through the wood.
Seized with unusual pains, they loudly cry:
Tanagrus hastens thence, and leaves his channel dry.
This curse the jealous Juno did invent,
And first employed for Iö's punishment.
To shun this ill, the cunning leach ordains,
In summer's sultry heats (for then it reigns)
To feed the females ere the sun arise,
Or late at night, when stars adorn the skies.
When she has calved, then set the dam aside,
And for the tender progeny provide.
Distinguish all betimes with branding fire,
To note the tribe, the lineage, and the sire;
Whom to reserve for husband of the herd,
Or who shall be to sacrifice preferred;
Or whom thou shalt to turn thy glebe allow,
To smooth the furrows, and sustain the plough:
The rest, for whom no lot is yet decreed,
May run in pastures, and at pleasure feed.
The calf, by nature and by genius made
To turn the glebe, breed to the rural trade.
Set him betimes to school; and let him be
Instructed there in rules of husbandry,
While yet his youth is flexible and green,
Nor bad examples of the world has seen.
Early begin the stubborn child to break;
For his soft neck, a supple collar make
Of bending osiers; and (with time and care
Inured that easy servitude to bear)
Thy flattering method on the youth pursue:
Joined with his school-fellows by two and two,
Persuade them first to lead an empty wheel,
That scarce the dust can raise, or they can feel:
In length of time produce the labouring yoke,
And shining shares, that make the furrows smoke.
Ere the licentious youth be thus restrained,
Or moral precepts on their minds have gained,
Their wanton appetites not only feed
With delicates of leaves, and marshy weed,
But with thy sickle reap the rankest land,
And minister the blade with bounteous hand:
Nor be with harmful parsimony won
To follow what our homely sires have done,
Who filled the pail with beestings of the cow,
But all her udder to the calf allow.
If to the warlike steed thy studies bend,
Or for the prize in chariots to contend,
Near Pisa's flood the rapid wheels to guide,
Or in Olympian groves aloft to ride,
The generous labours of the courser, first,
Must be with sight of arms and sounds of trumpets nursed;
Inured the groaning axle-tree to bear,
And let him clashing whips in stables hear.
Sooth him with praise, and make him understand
The loud applauses of his master's hand:
This, from his weaning, let him well be taught;
And then betimes in a soft snaffle wrought,
Before his tender joints with nerves are knit,
Untried in arms, and trembling at the bit.
But, when to four full springs his years advance,
Teach him to run the round, with pride to prance,
And (rightly managed) equal time to beat,
To turn, to bound in measure, and curvet.
Let him to this, with easy pains, be brought,
And seem to labour, when he labours not.
Thus formed for speed, he challenges the wind,
And leaves the Scythian arrow far behind:
He scours along the field, with loosened reins,
And treads so light, he scarcely prints the plains;
Like Boreas in his race, when, rushing forth,
He sweeps the skies, and clears the cloudy north:
The waving harvest bends beneath his blast,
The forest shakes, the groves their honours cast;
He flies aloft, and with impetuous roar
Pursues the foaming surges to the shore.
Thus, o'er the Elean plains, thy well-breathed horse
Impels the flying car, and wins the course,
Or, bred to Belgian waggons, leads the way,
Untired at night, and chearful all the day.
When once he's broken, feed him full and high;
Indulge his growth, and his gaunt sides supply.
Before his training, keep him poor and low;
For his stout stomach with his food will grow:
The pampered colt will discipline disdain,
Impatient of the lash, and restiff to the rein.
Would'st thou their courage and their strength improve?
Too soon they must not feel the stings of love.
Whether the bull or courser be thy care,
Let him not leap the cow, nor mount the mare.
The youthful bull must wander in the wood
Behind the mountain, or beyond the flood,
Or in the stall at home his fodder find,
Far from the charms of that alluring kind.
With two fair eyes his mistress burns his breast:
He looks, and languishes, and leaves his rest,
Forsakes his food, and, pining for the lass,
Is joyless of the grove, and spurns the growing grass.
The soft seducer, with enticing looks,
The bellowing rivals to the fight provokes.
A beauteous heifer in the wood is bred:
The stooping warriors, aiming head to head,
Engage their clashing horns: with dreadful sound
The forest rattles, and the rocks rebound.
They fence, they push, and, pushing, loudly roar:
Their dewlaps and their sides are bathed in gore.
Nor, when the war is over, is it peace;
Nor will the vanquished bull his claim release;
But, feeding in his breast his ancient fires,
And cursing fate, from his proud foe retires.
Driven from his native land to foreign grounds,
He with a generous rage resents his wounds,
His ignominious flight, the victor's boast,
And, more than both, the loves, which unrevenged he lost.
Often he turns his eyes, and, with a groan,
Surveys the pleasing kingdoms, once his own:
And therefore to repair his strength he tries, }
Hardening his limbs with painful exercise, }
And rough upon the flinty rock he lies. }
On prickly leaves and on sharp herbs he feeds,
Then to the prelude of a war proceeds.
His horns, yet sore, he tries against a tree,
And meditates his absent enemy.
He snuffs the wind; his heels the sand excite; }
But, when he stands collected in his might, }
He roars, and promises a more successful fight. }
Then, to redeem his honour at a blow,
He moves his camp, to meet his careless foe.
Not more with madness, rolling from afar,
The spumy waves proclaim the watery war,
And mounting upwards, with a mighty roar,
March onwards, and insult the rocky shore.
They mate the middle region with their height,
And fall no less than with a mountain's weight;
The waters boil, and, belching, from below
Black sands, as from a forceful engine, throw.
Thus every creature, and of every kind,
The secret joys of sweet coition find,
Not only man's imperial race, but they
That wing the liquid air, or swim the sea,
Or haunt the desert, rush into the flame:
For Love is lord of all, and is in all the same.
'Tis with this rage, the mother lion stung,
Scours o'er the plain, regardless of her young:
Demanding rites of love, she sternly stalks,
And hunts her lover in his lonely walks.
'Tis then the shapeless bear his den forsakes;
In woods and fields a wild destruction makes:
Boars whet their tusks; to battle tigers move,
Enraged with hunger, more enraged with love.
Then woe to him, that, in the desert land
Of Libya, travels o'er the burning sand!
The stallion snuffs the well-known scent afar,
And snorts and trembles for the distant mare;
Nor bits nor bridles can his rage restrain,
And rugged rocks are interposed in vain:
He makes his way o'er mountains, and contemns
Unruly torrents, and unforded streams.
The bristled boar, who feels the pleasing wound,
New grinds his arming tusks, and digs the ground.
The sleepy lecher shuts his little eyes;
About his churning chaps the frothy bubbles rise:
He rubs his sides against a tree; prepares
And hardens both his shoulders for the wars.
What did the youth, when Love's unerring dart
Transfixed his liver, and inflamed his heart?
Alone, by night, his watery way he took;
About him, and above, the billows broke;
The sluices of the sky were open spread,
And rolling thunder rattled o'er his head;
The raging tempest called him back in vain,
And every boding omen of the main:
Nor could his kindred, nor the kindly force
Of weeping parents, change his fatal course;
No, not the dying maid, who must deplore
His floating carcase on the Sestian shore.
I pass the wars that spotted lynxes make
With their fierce rivals for the female's sake,
The howling wolves', the mastiffs' amorous rage;
When even the fearful stag dares for his hind engage.
But, far above the rest, the furious mare,
Barred from the male, is frantic with despair:
For, when her pouting vent declares her pain,
She tears the harness, and she rends the rein.
For this (when Venus gave them rage and power)
Their master's mangled members they devour,
Of love defrauded in their longing hour.
For love, they force through thickets of the wood,
They climb the steepy hills, and stem the flood.
When, at the spring's approach, their marrow burns,
(For with the spring their genial warmth returns,)
The mares to cliffs of rugged rocks repair,
And with wide nostrils snuff the western air:
When (wonderous to relate!) the parent wind,
Without the stallion, propagates the kind.
Then, fired with amorous rage, they take their flight
Through plains, and mount the hills' unequal height;
Nor to the north, nor to the rising sun,
Nor southward to the rainy regions, run,
But boring to the west, and hovering there,
With gaping mouths, they draw prolific air;
With which impregnate, from their groins they shed
A slimy juice, by false conception bred.
The shepherd knows it well, and calls by name
Hippomanes, to note the mother's flame.
This, gathered in the planetary hour,
With noxious weeds, and spelled with words of power,
Dire stepdames in the magic bowl infuse,
And mix, for deadly draughts, the poisonous juice.
But time is lost, which never will renew, }
While we too far the pleasing path pursue, }
Surveying nature with too nice a view. }
Let this suffice for herds: our following care
Shall woolly flocks and shaggy goats declare.
Nor can I doubt what oil I must bestow,
To raise my subject from a ground so low;
And the mean matter, which my theme affords,
To embellish with magnificence of words.
But the commanding Muse my chariot guides,
Which o'er the dubious cliff securely rides;
And pleased I am, no beaten road to take,
But first the way to new discoveries make.
Now, sacred Pales, in a lofty strain
I sing the rural honours of thy reign.
First, with assiduous care from winter keep,
Well foddered in the stalls, thy tender sheep:
Then spread with straw the bedding of thy fold,
With fern beneath, to 'fend the bitter cold;
That free from gouts thou may'st preserve thy care,
And clear from scabs, produced by freezing air.
Next, let thy goats officiously be nursed,
And led to living streams, to quench their thirst.
Feed them with winter-browze; and, for their lair,
A cote, that opens to the south, prepare;
Where basking in the sun-shine they may lie,
And the short remnants of his heat enjoy.
This during winter's drisly reign be done,
Till the new Ram receives the exalted sun.[17]
For hairy goats of equal profit are
With woolly sheep, and ask an equal care.
'Tis true, the fleece, when drunk with Tyrian juice,
Is dearly sold; but not for needful use:
For the salacious goat increases more,
And twice as largely yields her milky store.
The still distended udders never fail,
But, when they seem exhausted, swell the pail.
Meantime the pastor shears their hoary beards,
And eases of their hair the loaden herds.
Their cam'lots, warm in tents, the soldier hold,
And shield the shivering mariner from cold.
On shrubs they browze, and, on the bleaky top
Of rugged hills, the thorny bramble crop.
Attended with their bleating kids, they come }
At night, unasked, and mindful of their home; }
And scarce their swelling bags the threshold overcome. }
So much the more thy diligence bestow
In depth of winter, to defend the snow,
By how much less the tender helpless kind,
For their own ills, can fit provision find.
Then minister the browze with bounteous hand,
And open let thy stacks all winter stand.
But, when the western winds with vital power
Call forth the tender grass and budding flower,
Then, at the last, produce in open air
Both flocks; and send them to their summer fare.
Before the sun while Hesperus appears,
First let them sip from herbs the pearly tears
Of morning dews, and after break their fast
On green-sward ground—a cool and grateful taste.
But, when the day's fourth hour has drawn the dews,
And the sun's sultry heat their thirst renews;
When creaking grashoppers on shrubs complain,
Then lead them to their watering-troughs again.
In summer's heat, some bending valley find,
Closed from the sun, but open to the wind;
Or seek some ancient oak, whose arms extend
In ample breadth, thy cattle to defend,
Or solitary grove, or gloomy glade,
To shield them with its venerable shade.
Once more to watering lead; and feed again
When the low sun is sinking to the main,
When rising Cynthia sheds her silver dews,
And the cool evening-breeze the meads renews,
When linnets fill the woods with tuneful sound,
And hollow shores the halcyon's voice rebound.
Why should my Muse enlarge on Libyan swains,
Their scattered cottages, and ample plains,
Where oft the flocks without a leader stray, }
Or through continued deserts take their way, }
And, feeding, add the length of night to day? }
Whole months they wander, grazing as they go;
Nor folds nor hospitable harbour know:
Such an extent of plains, so vast a space
Of wilds unknown, and of untasted grass,
Allures their eyes: the shepherd last appears,
And with him all his patrimony bears,
His house and household gods, his trade of war,
His bow and quiver, and his trusty cur.
Thus, under heavy arms, the youth of Rome
Their long laborious marches overcome,
Cheerly their tedious travels undergo,
And pitch their sudden camp before the foe.
Not so the Scythian shepherd tends his fold,
Nor he who bears in Thrace the bitter cold,
Nor he who treads the bleak Mæotian strand,
Or where proud Ister rolls his yellow sand.
Early they stall their flocks and herds; for there
No grass the fields, no leaves the forests, wear:
The frozen earth lies buried there, below }
A hilly heap, seven cubits deep in snow; }
And all the west allies of stormy Boreas blow. }
The sun from far peeps with a sickly face,
Too weak the clouds and mighty fogs to chase,
When up the skies he shoots his rosy head,
Or in the ruddy ocean seeks his bed.
Swift rivers are with sudden ice constrained;
And studded wheels are on its back sustained,
A hostry now for waggons, which before
Tall ships of burden on its bosom bore.
The brazen cauldrons with the frost are flawed;
The garment, stiff with ice, at hearths is thawed;
With axes first they cleave the wine; and thence,
By weight, the solid portions they dispense.
From locks uncombed, and from the frozen beard,
Long icicles depend, and crackling sounds are heard,
Meantime perpetual sleet, and driving snow,
Obscure the skies, and hang on herds below.
The starving cattle perish in their stalls;
Huge oxen stand inclosed in wintery walls
Of snow congealed; whole herds are buried there
Of mighty stags, and scarce their horns appear.
The dexterous huntsman wounds not these afar
With shafts or darts, or makes a distant war
With dogs, or pitches toils to stop their flight,
But close engages in unequal fight;
And, while they strive in vain to make their way
Through hills of snow, and pitifully bray,
Assaults with dint of sword, or pointed spears,
And homeward, on his back, the joyful burden bears.
The men to subterranean caves retire,
Secure from cold, and crowd the cheerful fire:
With trunks of elms and oaks the hearth they load,
Nor tempt the inclemency of heaven abroad.
Their jovial nights in frolics and in play
They pass, to drive the tedious hours away,
And their cold stomachs with crowned goblets cheer
Of windy cyder, and of barmy beer.
Such are the cold Rhipæan race, and such
The savage Scythian, and unwarlike Dutch,
Where skins of beasts the rude barbarians wear,
The spoils of foxes, and the furry bear.
Is wool thy care? Let not thy cattle go
Where bushes are, where burs and thistles grow;
Nor in too rank a pasture let them feed;
Then of the purest white select thy breed.
Even though a snowy ram thou shalt behold,
Prefer him not in haste for husband to thy fold:
But search his mouth; and, if a swarthy tongue
Is underneath his humid palate hung,
Reject him, lest he darken all the flock,
And substitute another from thy stock.
'Twas thus, with fleeces milky white, (if we
May trust report,) Pan, god of Arcady,
Did bribe thee, Cynthia; nor didst thou disdain,
When called in woody shades, to cure a lover's pain.
If milk be thy design, with plenteous hand
Bring clover-grass; and from the marshy land
Salt herbage for the foddering rack provide,
To fill their bags, and swell the milky tide.
These raise their thirst, and to the taste restore
The savour of the salt, on which they fed before.
Some, when the kids their dams too deeply drain,
With gags and muzzles their soft mouths restrain.
Their morning milk the peasants press at night;
Their evening meal, before the rising light,
To market bear; or sparingly they steep
With seasoning salt, and stored for winter keep.
Nor, last, forget thy faithful dogs; but feed
With fattening whey the mastiffs' generous breed,
And Spartan race, who, for the fold's relief,
Will prosecute with cries the nightly thief,
Repulse the prowling wolf, and hold at bay
The mountain robbers rushing to the prey.
With cries of hounds, thou may'st pursue the fear
Of flying hares, and chase the fallow deer,
Rouze from their desert dens the bristled rage
Of boars, and beamy stags in toils engage.
With smoke of burning cedar scent thy walls,
And fume with stinking galbanum thy stalls,
With that rank odour from thy dwelling-place
To drive the viper's brood, and all the venomed race:
For often, under stalls unmoved, they lie,
Obscure in shades, and shunning heaven's broad eye:
And snakes, familiar, to the hearth succeed,
Disclose their eggs, and near the chimney breed—
Whether to roofy houses they repair,
Or sun themselves abroad in open air,
In all abodes, of pestilential kind
To sheep and oxen, and the painful hind.
Take, shepherd, take a plant of stubborn oak,
And labour him with many a sturdy stroke,
Or with hard stones demolish from afar
His haughty crest, the seat of all the war;
Invade his hissing throat, and winding spires;
Till, stretched in length, the unfolded foe retires.
He drags his tail, and for his head provides, }
And in some secret cranny slowly glides; }
But leaves exposed to blows his back and battered sides. }
In fair Calabria's woods a snake is bred,
With curling crest, and with advancing head:
Waving he rolls, and makes a winding track;
His belly spotted, burnished is his back.
While springs are broken, while the southern air
And dropping heavens the moistened earth repair,
He lives on standing lakes and trembling bogs,
And fills his maw with fish, or with loquacious frogs:
But when, in muddy pools, the water sinks,
And the chapt earth is furrowed o'er with chinks,
He leaves the fens, and leaps upon the ground,
And, hissing, rolls his glaring eyes around.
With thirst inflamed, impatient of the heats,
He rages in the fields, and wide destruction threats.
Oh! let not sleep my closing eyes invade
In open plains, or in the secret shade,
When he, renewed in all the speckled pride
Of pompous youth, has cast his slough aside,
And in his summer livery rolls along, }
Erect, and brandishing his forky tongue, }
Leaving his nest, and his imperfect young, }
And thoughtless of his eggs, forgets to rear
The hopes of poison for the following year.
The causes and the signs shall next be told,
Of every sickness that infects the fold.
A scabby tetter on their pelts will stick,
When the raw rain has pierced them to the quick,
Or searching frosts have eaten through the skin,
Or burning icicles are lodged within;
Or, when the fleece is shorn, if sweat remains
Unwashed, and soaks into their empty veins;
When their defenceless limbs the brambles tear,
Short of their wool, and naked from the shear.
Good shepherds, after shearing, drench their sheep: }
And their flock's father (forced from high to leap) }
Swims down the stream, and plunges in the deep. }
They oint their naked limbs with mothered oil;
Or, from the founts where living sulphurs boil,
They mix a med'cine to foment their limbs,
With scum that on the molten silver swims;
Fat pitch, and black bitumen, add to these, }
Besides the waxen labour of the bees, }
And hellebore, and squills deep-rooted in the seas. }
Receipts abound; but, searching all thy store,
The best is still at hand, to lance the sore,
And cut the head; for, till the core be found,
The secret vice is fed, and gathers ground,
While, making fruitless moan, the shepherd stands, }
And, when the lancing-knife requires his hands, }
Vain help, with idle prayers, from heaven demands. }
Deep in their bones when fevers fix their seat,
And rack their limbs, and lick the vital heat,
The ready cure to cool the raging pain
Is underneath the foot to breathe a vein.
This remedy the Scythian shepherds found:
The inhabitants of Thracia's hilly ground,
And Gelons, use it, when for drink and food
They mix their crudled milk with horses' blood.
But, where thou seest a single sheep remain
In shades aloof, or couched upon the plain,
Or listlessly to crop the tender grass,
Or late to lag behind with truant pace;
Revenge the crime, and take the traitor's head,
Ere in the faultless flock the dire contagion spread.
On winter seas we fewer storms behold,
Than foul diseases that infect the fold.
Nor do those ills on single bodies prey, }
But oftener bring the nation to decay, }
And sweep the present stock and future hope away. }
A dire example of this truth appears,
When, after such a length of rolling years,
We see the naked Alps, and thin remains }
Of scattered cots, and yet unpeopled plains, }
Once filled with grazing flocks, the shepherds' happy reigns. }
Here, from the vicious air and sickly skies,
A plague did on the dumb creation rise:
During the autumnal heats the infection grew,
Tame cattle and the beasts of nature slew,
Poisoning the standing lakes, and pools impure;
Nor was the foodful grass in fields secure.
Strange death! for, when the thirsty fire had drunk
Their vital blood, and the dry nerves were shrunk,
When the contracted limbs were cramped, even then
A waterish humour swelled and oozed again,
Converting into bane the kindly juice,
Ordained by Nature for a better use.
The victim ox, that was for altars prest,
Trimmed with white ribbons, and with garlands drest,
Sunk of himself, without the god's command,
Preventing the slow sacrificer's hand.
Or, by the holy butcher if he fell,
The inspected entrails could no fates foretell;
Nor, laid on altars, did pure flames arise;
But clouds of smouldering smoke forbade the sacrifice.
Scarcely the knife was reddened with his gore,
Or the black poison stained the sandy floor.
The thriven calves in meads their food forsake,
And render their sweet souls before the plenteous rack.
The fawning dog runs mad; the wheezing swine
With coughs is choked, and labours from the chine:
The victor horse, forgetful of his food,
The palm renounces, and abhors the flood.
He paws the ground; and on his hanging ears }
A doubtful sweat in clammy drops appears: }
Parched is his hide, and rugged are his hairs. }
Such are the symptoms of the young disease;
But, in time's process, when his pains increase,
He rolls his mournful eyes; he deeply groans
With patient sobbing, and with manly moans.
He heaves for breath; which, from his lungs supplied,
And fetched from far, distends his labouring side.
To his rough palate his dry tongue succeeds;
And ropy gore he from his nostrils bleeds.
A drench of wine has with success been used,
And through a horn the generous juice infused,
Which, timely taken, op'd his closing jaws,
But, if too late, the patient's death did cause:
For the too vigorous dose too fiercely wrought,
And added fury to the strength it brought.
Recruited into rage, he grinds his teeth
In his own flesh, and feeds approaching death.
Ye gods, to better fate good men dispose,
And turn that impious error on our foes!
The steer, who to the yoke was bred to bow,
(Studious of tillage, and the crooked plough,)
Falls down and dies; and, dying, spews a flood
Of foamy madness, mixed with clotted blood.
The clown, who, cursing Providence, repines,
His mournful fellow from the team disjoins;
With many a groan forsakes his fruitless care,
And in the unfinished furrow leaves the share.
The pining steer, no shades of lofty woods,
Nor flowery meads, can ease, nor crystal floods
Rolled from the rock: his flabby flanks decrease;
His eyes are settled in a stupid peace;
His bulk too weighty for his thighs is grown,
And his unwieldy neck hangs drooping down.
Now what avails his well-deserving toil
To turn the glebe, or smooth the rugged soil?
And yet he never supped in solemn state,
(Nor undigested feasts did urge his fate,)
Nor day to night luxuriously did join,
Nor surfeited on rich Campanian wine.
Simple his beverage, homely was his food,
The wholesome herbage, and the running flood:
No dreadful dreams awaked him with affright;
His pains by day secured his rest by night.
'Twas then that buffaloes, ill paired, were seen
To draw the car of Jove's imperial queen,
For want of oxen; and the labouring swain }
Scratched, with a rake, a furrow for his grain, }
And covered with his hand the shallow seed again. }
He yokes himself, and up the hilly height,
With his own shoulders, draws the waggon's weight.
The nightly wolf, that round the enclosure prowled
To leap the fence, now plots not on the fold,
Tamed with a sharper pain. The fearful doe, }
And flying stag, amidst the greyhounds go, }
And round the dwellings roam of man, their fiercer foe. }
The scaly nations of the sea profound,
Like shipwrecked carcases, are driven aground,
And mighty phocæ, never seen before
In shallow streams, are stranded on the shore.
The viper dead within her hole is found:
Defenceless was the shelter of the ground.
The water-snake, whom fish and paddocks fed,
With staring scales lies poisoned in his bed:
To birds their native heavens contagious prove;
From clouds they fall, and leave their souls above.
Besides, to change their pasture 'tis in vain,
Or trust to physic; physic is their bane.
The learned leaches in despair depart,
And shake their heads, desponding of their art.
Tisiphone, let loose from under ground,
Majestically pale, now treads the round,
Before her drives diseases and affright, }
And every moment rises to the sight, }
Aspiring to the skies, encroaching on the light. }
The rivers, and their banks, and hills around,
With lowings and with dying bleats resound.
At length, she strikes an universal blow;
To death at once whole herds of cattle go;
Sheep, oxen, horses, fall; and, heaped on high,
The differing species in confusion lie,
'Till, warned by frequent ills, the way they found
To lodge their loathsome carrion under ground:
For useless to the currier were their hides;
Nor could their tainted flesh with ocean tides
Be freed from filth; nor could Vulcanian flame
The stench abolish, or the savour tame.
Nor safely could they shear their fleecy store,
(Made drunk with poisonous juice, and stiff with gore,)
Or touch the web: but, if the vest they wear,
Red blisters rising on their paps appear,
And flaming carbuncles, and noisome sweat,
And clammy dews, that loathsome lice beget;
Till the slow-creeping evil eats his way,
Consumes the parching-limbs, and makes the life his prey.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] It has been objected to me, that I understood not this passage of Virgil, because I call Niphates a river, which is a mountain in Armenia. But the river arising from the same mountain is also called Niphates; and, having spoken of Nile before, I might reasonably think that Virgil rather meant to couple two rivers, than a river and a mountain. Dryden.

[14] Dr Carey reads dropping; but there is no authority, and seemingly no necessity, for the change.

[15] Dr Carey reads conquests, in the plural; but the word, in the singular, implies more emphatically a career of victory.

[16] The transition is obscure in Virgil. He began with cows, then proceeds to treat of horses, now returns to cows. Dryden.

[17] Astrologers tell us, that the sun receives his exaltation in the sign Aries: Virgil perfectly understood both astronomy and astrology.

[GEORGICS.]
BOOK IV.

ARGUMENT.

Virgil has taken care to raise the subject of each Georgic. In the first, he has only dead matter on which to work. In the second, he just steps on the world of life, and describes that degree of it which is to be found in vegetables. In the third, he advances to animals: and, in the last, he singles out the Bee, which may be reckoned the most sagacious of them, for his subject.

In this Georgic, he shews us what station is most proper for the bees, and when they begin to gather honey; how to call them home when they swarm; and how to part them when they are engaged in battle. From hence he takes occasion to discover their different kinds; and, after an excursion, relates their prudent and politic administration of affairs, and the several diseases that often rage in their hives, with the proper symptoms and remedies of each disease. In the last place, he lays down a method of repairing their kind, supposing their whole breed lost; and gives at large the history of its invention.

The gifts of heaven my following song pursues,
Aërial honey, and ambrosial dews.
Mæcenas, read this other part, that sings }
Embattled squadrons, and adventurous kings— }
A mighty pomp, though made of little things. }
Their arms, their arts, their manners, I disclose,
And how they war, and whence the people rose.
Slight is the subject, but the praise not small,
If heaven assist, and Phœbus hear my call.
First, for thy bees a quiet station find,
And lodge them under covert of the wind,
(For winds, when homeward they return, will drive
The loaded carriers from their evening hive,)
Far from the cows' and goats' insulting crew,
That trample down the flowers, and brush the dew.
The painted lizard, and the birds of prey,
Foes of the frugal kind, be far away—
The titmouse, and the pecker's hungry brood,
And Procne, with her bosom stained in blood:
These rob the trading citizens, and bear }
The trembling captives through the liquid air, }
And for their callow young a cruel feast prepare. }
But near a living stream their mansion place,
Edged round with moss, and tufts of matted grass:
And plant (the winds' impetuous rage to stop)
Wild olive trees, or palms, before the busy shop;
That, when the youthful prince,[18] with proud alarm,
Calls out the venturous colony to swarm—
When first their way through yielding air they wing,
New to the pleasures of their native spring—
The banks of brooks may make a cool retreat
For the raw soldiers from the scalding heat,
And neighbouring trees with friendly shade invite
The troops, unused to long laborious flight.
Then o'er the running stream, or standing lake,
A passage for thy weary people make;
With osier floats the standing water strow;
Of massy stones make bridges, if it flow;
That basking in the sun thy bees may lie,
And, resting there, their flaggy pinions dry,
When, late returning home, the laden host
By raging winds is wrecked upon the coast.
Wild thyme and savory set around their cell,
Sweet to the taste, and fragrant to the smell:
Set rows of rosemary with flowering stem,
And let the purple violets drink the stream.
Whether thou build the palace of thy bees
With twisted osiers, or with barks of trees,
Make but a narrow mouth: for, as the cold
Congeals into a lump the liquid gold,
So 'tis again dissolved by summer's heat
And the sweet labours both extremes defeat.
And therefore, not in vain, the industrious kind
With dauby wax and flowers the chinks have lined,
And, with their stores of gathered glue, contrive
To stop the vents and crannies of their hive.
Not birdlime, or Idæan pitch, produce
A more tenacious mass of clammy juice.
Nor bees are lodged in hives alone, but found
In chambers of their own beneath the ground;
Their vaulted roofs are hung in pumices,
And in the rotten trunks of hollow trees.
But plaster thou the chinky hives with clay,
And leafy branches o'er their lodgings lay:
Nor place them where too deep a water flows, }
Or where the yew, their pois'nous neighbour, grows; }
Nor roast red crabs, to offend the niceness of their nose; }
Nor near the steaming stench of muddy ground; }
Nor hollow rocks that render back the sound, }
And doubled images of voice rebound. }
For what remains, when golden suns appear,
And under earth have driven the winter year,
The winged nation wanders through the skies,
And o'er the plains and shady forest flies;
Then, stooping on the meads and leafy bowers,
They skim the floods, and sip the purple flowers.
Exalted hence, and drunk with secret joy,
Their young succession all their cares employ:
They breed, they brood, instruct and educate,
And make provision for the future state;
They work their waxen lodgings in their hives,
And labour honey to sustain their lives.
But when thou seest a swarming cloud arise,
That sweeps aloft, and darkens all the skies,
The motions of their hasty flight attend;
And know, to floods or woods, their airy march they bend.
Then melfoil beat, and honey-suckles pound; }
With these alluring savours strew the ground; }
And mix with tinkling brass the cymbal's droning sound. }
Straight to their ancient cells, recalled from air,
The reconciled deserters will repair.
But, if intestine broils alarm the hive,
(For two pretenders oft for empire strive,)
The vulgar in divided factions jar;
And murmuring sounds proclaim the civil war.
Inflamed with ire, and trembling with disdain,
Scarce can their limbs their mighty souls contain.
With shouts, the coward's courage they excite,
And martial clangors call them out to fight;
With hoarse alarms the hollow camp rebounds,
That imitate the trumpet's angry sounds;
Then to their common standard they repair;
The nimble horsemen scour the fields of air;
In form of battle drawn, they issue forth,
And every knight is proud to prove his worth.
Prest for their country's honour, and their king's, }
On their sharp beaks they whet their pointed stings, }
And exercise their arms, and tremble with their wings. }
Full in the midst the haughty monarchs ride; }
The trusty guards come up, and close the side; }
With shouts the daring foe to battle is defied. }
Thus, in the season of unclouded spring,
To war they follow their undaunted king,
Crowd through their gates, and, in the fields of light,
The shocking squadrons meet in mortal fight.
Headlong they fall from high, and, wounded, wound,
And heaps of slaughtered soldiers bite the ground.
Hard hailstones lie not thicker on the plain,
Nor shaken oaks such showers of acorns rain.
With gorgeous wings, the marks of sovereign sway,
The two contending princes make their way;
Intrepid through the midst of danger go,
Their friends encourage and amaze the foe.
With mighty souls in narrow bodies prest,
They challenge, and encounter breast to breast;
So fixed on fame, unknowing how to fly,
And obstinately bent to win or die,
That long the doubtful combat they maintain,
Till one prevails—for one can only reign.
Yet all these dreadful deeds, this deadly fray, }
A cast of scattered dust will soon allay, }
And undecided leave the fortune of the day. }
When both the chiefs are sundered from the fight,
Then to the lawful king restore his right;
And let the wasteful prodigal be slain,
That he, who best deserves, alone may reign.
With ease distinguished is the regal race:
One monarch wears an honest open face;
Shaped to his size, and godlike to behold,
His royal body shines with specks of gold,
And ruddy scales; for empire he designed,
Is better born, and of a nobler kind.
That other looks like nature in disgrace: }
Gaunt are his sides, and sullen is his face; }
And like their grisly prince appear his gloomy race, }
Grim, ghastly, rugged, like a thirsty train }
That long have travelled through a desert plain, }
And spit from their dry chaps the gathered dust again. }
The better brood, unlike the bastard crew,
Are marked with royal streaks of shining hue;
Glittering and ardent, though in body less:
From these, at pointed seasons, hope to press
Huge heavy honeycombs, of golden juice,
Not only sweet, but pure, and fit for use,
To allay the strength and hardness of the wine,
And with old Bacchus new metheglin join.
But, when the swarms are eager of their play,
And loath their empty hives, and idly stray,
Restrain the wanton fugitives, and take
A timely care to bring the truants back.
The task is easy—but to clip the wings
Of their high-flying arbitrary kings.
At their command, the people swarm away:
Confine the tyrant, and the slaves will stay.
Sweet gardens, full of saffron flowers, invite
The wandering gluttons, and retard their flight—
Besides the god obscene, who frights away,
With his lath sword, the thieves and birds of prey
With his own hand, the guardian of the bees,
For slips of pines may search the mountain trees,
And with wild thyme and savory plant the plain,
Till his hard horny fingers ache with pain;
And deck with fruitful trees the fields around,
And with refreshing waters drench the ground.
Now, did I not so near my labours end, }
Strike sail, and hastening to the harbour tend, }
My song to flowery gardens might extend— }
To teach the vegetable arts, to sing
The Pæstan roses, and their double spring;
How succory drinks the running streams, and how
Green beds of parsley near the river grow;
How cucumbers along the surface creep,
With crooked bodies, and with bellies deep—
The late narcissus, and the winding trail
Of bear's-foot, myrtles green, and ivy pale:
For, where with stately towers Tarentum stands,
And deep Galæsus soaks the yellow sands,
I chanced an old Corycian swain to know, }
Lord of few acres, and those barren too, }
Unfit for sheep or vines, and more unfit to sow; }
Yet, labouring well his little spot of ground,
Some scattering pot-herbs here and there he found,
Which, cultivated with his daily care,
And bruised with vervain, were his frugal fare.
Sometimes white lilies did their leaves afford,
With wholsome poppy-flowers, to mend his homely board;
For, late returning home, he supped at ease, }
And wisely deemed the wealth of monarchs less; }
The little of his own, because his own, did please. }
To quit his care, he gathered, first of all,
In spring the roses, apples in the fall;
And, when cold winter split the rocks in twain,
And ice the running rivers did restrain,
He stripped the bear's-foot of its leafy growth,
And, calling western winds, accused the spring of sloth.
He therefore first among the swains was found }
To reap the product of his laboured ground, }
And squeeze the combs with golden liquor crowned. }
His limes were first in flowers; his lofty pines,
With friendly shade, secured his tender vines.
For every bloom his trees in spring afford,
An autumn apple was by tale restored.
He knew to rank his elms in even rows, }
For fruit the grafted pear-tree to dispose, }
And tame to plums the sourness of the sloes. }
With spreading planes he made a cool retreat,
To shade good fellows from the summer's heat.
But, straitened in my space, I must forsake
This task, for others afterwards to take.
Describe we next the nature of the bees,
Bestowed by Jove for secret services,
When, by the tinkling sound of timbrels led,
The king of heaven in Cretan caves they fed.
Of all the race of animals, alone
The bees have common cities of their own,
And common sons; beneath one law they live,
And with one common stock their traffic drive.
Each has a certain home, a several stall;
All is the state's, the state provides for all.
Mindful of coming cold, they share the pain,
And hoard, for winter's use, the summer's gain.
Some o'er the public magazines preside,
And some are sent new forage to provide;
These drudge in fields abroad, and those at home }
Lay deep foundations for the laboured comb, }
With dew, narcissus-leaves, and clammy gum. }
To pitch the waxen flooring some contrive;
Some nurse the future nation of the hive;
Sweet honey some condense; some purge the grout;
The rest, in cells apart, the liquid nectar shut:
All, with united force, combine to drive
The lazy drones from the laborious hive:
With envy stung, they view each other's deeds;
With diligence the fragrant work proceeds.
As, when the Cyclops, at the almighty nod,
New thunder hasten for their angry god,
Subdued in fire the stubborn metal lies;
One brawny smith the puffing bellows plies,
And draws and blows reciprocating air:
Others to quench the hissing mass prepare;
With lifted arms they order every blow, }
And chime their sounding hammers in a row; }
With laboured anvils Ætna groans below. }
Strongly they strike; huge flakes of flames expire;
With tongs they turn the steel, and vex it in the fire.
If little things with great we may compare,
Such are the bees, and such their busy care;
Studious of honey, each in his degree,
The youthful swain, the grave experienced bee—
That in the field; this, in affairs of state
Employed at home, abides within the gate,
To fortify the combs, to build the wall,
To prop the ruins, lest the fabric fall:
But, late at night, with weary pinions come
The labouring youth, and heavy laden, home.
Plains, meads, and orchards, all the day he plies;
The gleans of yellow thyme distend his thighs:
He spoils the saffron flowers; he sips the blues
Of violets, wilding blooms, and willow dews.
Their toil is common, common is their sleep;
They shake their wings when morn begins to peep,
Rush through the city-gates without delay,
Nor ends their work, but with declining day.
Then, having spent the last remains of light,
They give their bodies due repose at night,
When hollow murmurs of their evening bells
Dismiss the sleepy swains, and toll them to their cells.
When once in beds their weary limbs they steep,
No buzzing sounds disturb their golden sleep:
'Tis sacred silence all. Nor dare they stray,
When rain is promised, or a stormy day;
But near the city walls their watering take,
Nor forage far, but short excursions make.
And as, when empty barks on billows float,
With sandy ballast sailors trim the boat;
So bees bear gravel-stones, whose poising weight
Steers through the whistling winds their steady flight.
But (what's more strange) their modest appetites,
Averse from Venus, fly the nuptial rites.
No lust enervates their heroic mind,
Nor wastes their strength on wanton womankind;
But in their mouths reside their genial powers:
They gather children from the leaves and flowers.
Thus make they kings to fill the regal seat, }
And thus their little citizens create, }
And waxen cities build, the palaces of state. }
And oft on rocks their tender wings they tear,
And sink beneath the burdens which they bear:
Such rage of honey in their bosom beats,
And such a zeal they have for flowery sweets.
Thus[19] though the race of life they quickly run,
Which in the space of seven short years is done,
The immortal line in sure succession reigns; }
The fortune of the family remains, }
And grandsires' grandsires[20] the long list contains. }
Besides, not Egypt, India, Media, more,
With servile awe, their idol king adore:
While he survives, in concord and content }
The commons live, by no divisions rent; }
But the great monarch's death dissolves the government. }
All goes to ruin; they themselves contrive
To rob the honey, and subvert the hive.
The king presides, his subjects' toil surveys.
The servile rout their careful Cæsar praise:
Him they extol: they worship him alone;
They crowd his levees, and support his throne:
They raise him on their shoulders with a shout;
And, when their sovereign's quarrel calls them out,
His foes to mortal combat they defy,
And think it honour at his feet to die.
Induced by such examples, some have taught,
That bees have portions of ethereal thought—
Endued with particles of heavenly fires;
For God the whole created mass inspires.
Through heaven, and earth, and ocean's depth, he throws
His influence round, and kindles as he goes.
Hence flocks, and herds, and men, and beasts, and fowls,
With breath are quickened, and attract their souls;
Hence take the forms his prescience did ordain,
And into him at length resolve again.
No room is left for death: they mount the sky,
And to their own congenial planets fly.
Now, when thou hast decreed to seize their stores,
And by prerogative to break their doors,
With sprinkled water first the city choke,
And then pursue the citizens with smoke.
Two honey-harvests fall in every year:
First, when the pleasing Pleiades appear,
And, springing upward, spurn the briny seas:
Again, when their affrighted choir surveys
The watery Scorpion mend his pace behind, }
With a black train of storms, and winter wind, }
They plunge into the deep, and safe protection find. }
Prone to revenge, the bees, a wrathful race,
When once provoked, assault the aggressor's face,
And through the purple veins a passage find;
There fix their stings, and leave their souls behind.
But, if a pinching winter thou foresee,
And would'st preserve thy famished family;
With fragrant thyme the city fumigate,
And break the waxen walls to save the state.
For lurking lizards often lodge, by stealth,
Within the suburbs, and purloin their wealth;
And worms, that shun the light,[21] a dark retreat
Have found in combs, and undermined the seat;
Or lazy drones, without their share of pain,
In winter-quarters free, devour the gain;
Or wasps infest the camp with loud alarms,
And mix in battle with unequal arms;
Or secret moths are there in silence fed;
Or spiders in the vault their snary webs have spread.
The more oppressed by foes, or famine-pined,
The more increase thy care to save the sinking kind:
With greens and flowers recruit their empty hives,
And seek fresh forage to sustain their lives.
But, since they share with man one common fate,
In health and sickness, and in turns of state,—
Observe the symptoms. When they fall away,
And languish with insensible decay,
They change their hue; with haggard eyes they stare;
Lean are their looks, and shagged is their hair:
And crowds of dead, that never must return }
To their loved hives, in decent pomp are borne: }
Their friends attend the hearse; the next relations mourn. }
The sick, for air, before the portal gasp,
Their feeble legs within each other clasp,
Or idle in their empty hives remain,
Benumbed with cold, and listless of their gain.
Soft whispers then, and broken sounds, are heard,
As when the woods by gentle winds are stirred;
Such stifled noise as the close furnace hides,
Or dying murmurs of departing tides.
This when thou seest, galbanean odours use,
And honey in the sickly hive infuse.
Through reeden pipes convey the golden flood,
To invite the people to their wonted food.
Mix it with thickened juice of sodden wines,
And raisins from the grapes of Psythian vines:
To these add pounded galls, and roses dry,
And, with Cecropian thyme, strong-scented centaury.
A flower there is, that grows in meadow-ground,
Amellus called, and easy to be found;
For, from one root, the rising stem bestows
A wood of leaves, and violet-purple boughs:
The flower itself is glorious to behold,
And shines on altars like refulgent gold—
Sharp to the taste—by shepherds near the stream
Of Mella found; and thence they gave the name.
Boil this restoring root in generous wine,
And set beside the door, the sickly stock to dine.
But, if the labouring kind be wholly lost,
And not to be retrieved with care or cost;
'Tis time to touch the precepts of an art,
The Arcadian master did of old impart;
And how he stocked his empty hives again,
Renewed with putrid gore of oxen slain.
An ancient legend I prepare to sing,
And upward follow Fame's immortal spring:—
For, where with seven-fold horns mysterious Nile
Surrounds the skirts of Egypt's fruitful isle,
And where in pomp the sun-burnt people ride,
On painted barges, o'er the teeming tide,
Which, pouring down from Ethiopian lands,
Makes green the soil with slime, and black prolific sands—
That length of region, and large tract of ground,
In this one art a sure relief have found.
First, in a place by nature close, they build
A narrow flooring, guttered, walled, and tiled.
In this, four windows are contrived, that strike,
To the four winds opposed, their beams oblique.
A steer of two years old they take, whose head
Now first with burnished horns begins to spread:
They stop his nostrils, while he strives in vain
To breathe free air, and struggles with his pain.
Knocked down, he dies: his bowels, bruised within,
Betray no wound on his unbroken skin.
Extended thus, in this obscene abode
They leave the beast; but first sweet flowers are strowed
Beneath his body, broken boughs and thyme,
And pleasing cassia just renewed in prime.
This must be done, ere spring makes equal day,
When western winds on curling waters play;
Ere painted meads produce their flowery crops,
Or swallows twitter on the chimney-tops.
The tainted blood, in this close prison pent,
Begins to boil, and through the bones ferment.
Then (wonderous to behold) new creatures rise,
A moving mass at first, and short of thighs;
'Till, shooting out with legs, and imp'd with wings,
The grubs proceed to bees with pointed stings;
And, more and more affecting air, they try
Their tender pinions, and begin to fly:
At length, like summer storms from spreading clouds,
That burst at once, and pour impetuous floods—
Or flights of arrows from the Parthian bows,
When from afar they gall embattled foes—
With such a tempest through the skies they steer,
And such a form the winged squadrons bear.
What god, O Muse! this useful science taught?
Or by what man's experience was it brought?
Sad Aristæus from fair Tempe fled— }
His bees with famine or diseases dead:— }
On Penëus's banks he stood, and near his holy head; }
And, while his falling tears the stream supplied,
Thus, mourning, to his mother goddess cried:—
"Mother Cyrene! mother, whose abode
Is in the depth of this immortal flood!
What boots it, that from Phœbus' loins I spring,
The third, by him and thee, from heaven's high king?
O! where is all thy boasted pity gone,
And promise of the skies to thy deluded son?
Why didst thou me, unhappy me, create,
Odious to gods, and born to bitter fate?
Whom scarce my sheep, and scarce my painful plough, }
The needful aids of human life allow: }
So wretched is thy son, so hard a mother thou! }
Proceed, inhuman parent, in thy scorn; }
Root up my trees; with blights destroy my corn; }
My vineyards ruin, and my sheepfolds burn. }
Let loose thy rage; let all thy spite be shown,
Since thus thy hate pursues the praises of thy son."
But, from her mossy bower below the ground, }
His careful mother heard the plaintive sound— }
Encompassed with her sea-green sisters round.[22] }
One common work they plied; their distaffs full
With carded locks of blue Milesian wool.
Spio, with Drymo brown, and Xantho fair,
And sweet Phyllodoce with long dishevelled hair;
Cydippe with Lycorias, one a maid,
And one that once had called Lucina's aid;
Clio and Beroë, from one father both;
Both girt with gold, and clad in party-coloured cloth;
Opis the meek, and Deiopeia proud;
Nisæa lofty, with Ligea loud;
Thalia joyous, Ephyre the sad, }
And Arethusa, once Diana's maid, }
But now (her quiver left) to love betrayed. }
To these Clymene the sweet theft declares
Of Mars; and Vulcan's unavailing cares;
And all the rapes of gods, and every love,
From ancient Chaos down to youthful Jove.
Thus while she sings, the sisters turn the wheel,
Empty the woolly rock, and fill the reel.
A mournful sound again the mother hears;
Again the mournful sound invades the sisters' ears.
Starting at once from their green seats, they rise—
Fear in their heart, amazement in their eyes.
But Arethusa, leaping from her bed, }
First lifts above the waves her beauteous head, }
And, crying from afar, thus to Cyrene said:— }
"O sister, not with causeless fear possest!
No stranger voice disturbs thy tender breast.
'Tis Aristæus, 'tis thy darling son,
Who to his careless mother makes his moan.
Near his paternal stream he sadly stands,
With downcast eyes, wet cheeks, and folded hands,
Upbraiding heaven from whence his lineage came,
And cruel calls the gods, and cruel thee, by name."
Cyrene, moved with love, and seized with fear,
Cries out,—"Conduct my son, conduct him here:
'Tis lawful for the youth, derived from gods,
To view the secrets of our deep abodes."
At once she waved her hand on either side;
At once the ranks of swelling streams divide.
Two rising heaps of liquid crystal stand,
And leave a space betwixt of empty sand.
Thus safe received, the downward track he treads,
Which to his mother's watery palace leads.
With wondering eyes he views the secret store
Of lakes, that pent in hollow caverns, roar;
He hears the crackling sounds of coral woods,
And sees the secret source of subterranean floods;
And where, distinguished in their several cells,
The fount of Phasis, and of Lycus, dwells;
Where swift Enipeus in his bed appears,
And Tyber his majestic forehead rears;
Whence Anio flows, and Hypanis profound
Breaks through the opposing rocks with raging sound;
Where Po first issues from his dark abodes,
And, awful in his cradle, rules the floods:
Two golden horns on his large front he wears,
And his grim face a bull's resemblance bears;
With rapid course he seeks the sacred main,
And fattens, as he runs, the fruitful plain.
Now, to the court arrived, the admiring son
Beholds the vaulted roofs of pory stone,
Now to his mother goddess tells his grief,
Which she with pity hears, and promises relief.
The officious nymphs, attending in a ring,
With waters drawn from their perpetual spring,
From earthly dregs his body purify,
And rub his temples, with fine towels, dry;
Then load the tables with a liberal feast,
And honour with full bowls their friendly guest.
The sacred altars are involved in smoke;
And the bright choir their kindred gods invoke.
Two bowls the mother fills with Lydian wine; }
Then thus: "Let these be poured, with rites divine, }
To the great authors of our watery line— }
To father Ocean, this; and this," she said, }
"Be to the nymphs his sacred sisters paid, }
Who rule the watery plains, and hold the woodland shade." }
She sprinkled thrice, with wine, the Vestal fire;
Thrice to the vaulted roof the flames aspire.
Raised with so blest an omen, she begun,
With words, like these, to cheer her drooping son:—
"In the Carpathian bottom, makes abode
The shepherd of the seas, a prophet and a god.
High o'er the main in watery pomp he rides,
His azure car and finny coursers guides—
Proteus his name.—To his Pallenian port
I see from far the weary god resort.
Him not alone we river gods adore,
But aged Nereus hearkens to his lore.
With sure foresight, and with unerring doom,
He sees what is, and was, and is to come.
This Neptune gave him, when he gave to keep
His scaly flocks, that graze the watery deep.
Implore his aid; for Proteus only knows
The secret cause, and cure, of all thy woes.
But first the wily wizard must be caught; }
For, unconstrained, he nothing tells for nought; }
Nor is with prayers, or bribes, or flattery bought. }
Surprise him first, and with hard fetters bind;
Then all his frauds will vanish into wind.
I will myself conduct thee on thy way:
When next the southing sun inflames the day,
When the dry herbage thirsts for dews in vain,
And sheep, in shades, avoid the parching plain;
Then will I lead thee to his secret seat, }
When, weary with his toil, and scorched with heat, }
The wayward sire frequents his cool retreat. }
His eyes with heavy slumber overcast—
With force invade his limbs, and bind him fast.
Thus surely bound, yet be not over bold:
The slippery god will try to loose his hold,
And various forms assume, to cheat thy sight,
And with vain images of beasts affright;
With foamy tusks he seems[23] a bristly boar,
Or imitates the lion's angry roar;
Breaks out in crackling flames to shun thy snares,
A dragon hisses, or a tiger stares;
Or, with a wile thy caution to betray,
In fleeting streams attempts to slide away.
But thou, the more he varies forms, beware
To strain his fetters with a stricter care.
Till, tiring all his arts, he turns again
To his true shape, in which he first was seen."
This said, with nectar she her son anoints,
Infusing vigour through his mortal joints:
Down from his head the liquid odours ran;
He breathed of heaven, and looked above a man.
Within a mountain's hollow womb, there lies
A large recess, concealed from human eyes,
Where heaps of billows, driven by wind and tide, }
In form of war, their watery ranks divide, }
And there, like centries set, without the mouth abide: }
A station safe for ships, when tempests roar,
A silent harbour, and a covered shore.
Secure within resides the various god,
And draws a rock upon his dark abode.
Hither with silent steps, secure from sight, }
The goddess guides her son, and turns him from the light: }
Herself, involved in clouds, precipitates her flight. }
'Twas noon; the sultry Dog-star from the sky
Scorched Indian swains; the rivelled grass was dry;
The sun with flaming arrows pierced the flood,
And, darting to the bottom, baked the mud;
When weary Proteus, from the briny waves,
Retired for shelter to his wonted caves.
His finny flocks about their shepherd play,
And, rolling round him, spirt the bitter sea.
Unwieldily they wallow first in ooze,
Then in the shady covert seek repose.
Himself, their herdsman, on the middle mount,
Takes of his mustered flocks a just account.
So, seated on a rock, a shepherd's groom
Surveys his evening flocks returning home,
When lowing calves and bleating lambs, from far,
Provoke the prowling wolf to nightly war.
The occasion offers, and the youth complies:
For scarce the weary god had closed his eyes,
When, rushing on with shouts, he binds in chains
The drowzy prophet, and his limbs constrains.
He, not unmindful of his usual art,
First in dissembled fire attempts to part:
Then roaring beasts, and running streams, he tries,
And wearies all his miracles of lies:
But, having shifted every form to 'scape,
Convinced of conquest, he resumed his shape,
And thus, at length, in human accent spoke:—
"Audacious youth! what madness could provoke
A mortal man to invade a sleeping god?
What business brought thee to my dark abode?"
To this, the audacious youth:—"Thou know'st full well
My name and business, god; nor need I tell.
No man can Proteus cheat: but, Proteus, leave
Thy fraudful arts, and do not thou deceive.
Following the gods' command, I come to implore
Thy help, my perished people to restore."
The seer, who could not yet his wrath assuage,
Rolled his green eyes, that sparkled with his rage,
And gnashed his teeth, and cried,—"No vulgar god
Pursues thy crimes, nor with a common rod.
Thy great misdeeds have met a due reward;
And Orpheus' dying prayers at length are heard.[24]
For crimes, not his, the lover lost his life,
And at thy hands requires his murdered wife:
Nor (if the Fates assist not) canst thou 'scape
The just revenge of that intended rape.
To shun thy lawless lust, the dying bride,
Unwary, took along the river's side,
Nor at her heels perceived the deadly snake,
That kept the bank, in covert of the brake.
But all her fellow nymphs the mountains tear
With loud laments, and break the yielding air:
The realms of Mars remurmur all around,
And echoes to the Athenian shores rebound.
The unhappy husband, husband now no more, }
Did on his tuneful harp his loss deplore, }
And sought his mournful mind with music to restore. }
On thee, dear wife, in deserts all alone, }
He called, sighed, sung: his griefs with day begun, }
Nor were they finished with the setting sun. }
Even to the dark dominions of the night
He took his way, through forests void of light,
And dared amidst the trembling ghosts to sing,
And stood before the inexorable king.
The infernal troops like passing shadows glide,
And, listening, crowd the sweet musician's side—
Not flocks of birds, when driven by storms or night,
Stretch to the forest with so thick a flight—
Men, matrons, children, and the unmarried maid, }
The mighty hero's more majestic shade,[25] }
And youths, on funeral piles before their parents laid. }
All these Cocytus bounds with squalid reeds,
With muddy ditches, and with deadly weeds;
And baleful Styx encompasses around,
With nine slow circling streams, the unhappy ground.
Even from the depths of hell the damned advance;
The infernal mansions, nodding, seem to dance;
The gaping three-mouthed dog forgets to snarl;
The Furies hearken, and their snakes uncurl;
Ixion seems no more his pain to feel,
But leans attentive on his standing wheel.
All dangers past, at length the lovely bride
In safety goes, with her melodious guide,
Longing the common light again to share,
And draw the vital breath of upper air—
He first; and close behind him followed she;
For such was Proserpine's severe decree—
When strong desires the impatient youth invade,
By little caution and much love betrayed:
A fault, which easy pardon might receive,
Were lovers judges, or could hell forgive:
For, near the confines of etherial light,
And longing for the glimmering of a sight,
The unwary lover cast his eyes behind,
Forgetful of the law, nor master of his mind.
Straight all his hopes exhaled in empty smoke,
And his long toils were forfeit for a look.
Three flashes of blue lightning gave the sign
Of covenants broke; three peals of thunder join.
Then thus the bride:—'What fury seized on thee,
Unhappy man! to lose thyself and me?
Dragged back again by cruel destinies,
An iron slumber shuts my swimming eyes.
And now, farewell! Involved in shades of night,
For ever I am ravished from thy sight.
In vain I reach my feeble hands, to join
In sweet embraces—ah! no longer thine!'
She said; and from his eyes the fleeting fair }
Retired like subtile smoke dissolved in air, }
And left her hopeless lover in despair. }
In vain, with folding arms, the youth essayed
To stop her flight, and strain the flying shade:
He prays, he raves, all means in vain he tries, }
With rage inflamed, astonished with surprise; }
But she returned no more, to bless his longing eyes. }
Nor would the infernal ferry-man once more
Be bribed to waft him to the farther shore
What should he do, who twice had lost his love?
What notes invent? what new petitions move?
Her soul already was consigned to Fate,
And shivering in the leaky sculler sate.
For seven continued months, if Fame say true,
The wretched swain his sorrows did renew:
By Strymon's freezing streams he sate alone:
The rocks were moved to pity with his moan:
Trees bent their heads to hear him sing his wrongs:
Fierce tigers couched around, and lolled their fawning tongues.
So, close in poplar shades, her children gone,
The mother nightingale laments alone,
Whose nest some prying churl had found, and thence,
By stealth, conveyed the unfeathered innocence
But she supplies the night with mournful strains;
And melancholy music fills the plains.
Sad Orpheus thus his tedious hours employs,
Averse from Venus, and from nuptial joys.
Alone he tempts the frozen floods, alone
The unhappy climes, where spring was never known:
He mourned his wretched wife, in vain restored,
And Pluto's unavailing boon deplored.
The Thracian matrons—who the youth accused
Of love disdained, and marriage rites refused—
With furies and nocturnal orgies fired,
At length against his sacred life conspired.
Whom even the savage beasts had spared, they killed,
And strewed his mangled limbs about the field.
Then, when his head, from his fair shoulders torn,
Washed by the waters, was on Hebrus borne,
Even then his trembling tongue invoked his bride; }
With his last voice, 'Eurydice,' he cried. }
'Eurydice,' the rocks and river-banks replied." }
This answer Proteus gave; nor more he said }
But in the billows plunged his hoary head; }
And, where he leaped, the waves in circles widely spread. }
The nymph returned, her drooping son to cheer,
And bade him banish his superfluous fear:
"For now," said she, "the cause is known, from whence
Thy woe succeeded, and for what offence.
The nymphs, companions of the unhappy maid,
This punishment upon thy crimes have laid;
And sent a plague among thy thriving bees.—
With vows and suppliant prayers their powers appease:
The soft Napæan race will soon repent[26]
Their anger, and remit the punishment.
The secret in an easy method lies;
Select four brawny bulls for sacrifice,
Which on Lycæus graze without a guide;
Add four fair heifers yet in yoke untried.
For these, four altars in their temple rear,
And then adore the woodland powers with prayer.
From the slain victims pour the streaming blood,
And leave their bodies in the shady wood:
Nine mornings thence, Lethæan poppy bring,
To appease the manes of the poet's[27] king:
And, to propitiate his offended bride,
A fatted calf and a black ewe provide:
This finished, to the former woods repair." }
His mother's precepts he performs with care; }
The temple visits, and adores with prayer; }
Four altars raises; from his herd he culls,
For slaughter, four the fairest of his bulls:
Four heifers from his female store he took,
All fair, and all unknowing of the yoke.
Nine mornings thence, with sacrifice and prayers,
The powers atoned, he to the grove repairs.
Behold a prodigy! for, from within
The broken bowels, and the bloated skin,
A buzzing noise of bees his ears alarms:
Straight issue through the sides assembling swarms.
Dark as a cloud, they make a wheeling flight,
Then on a neighbouring tree, descending, light:
Like a large cluster of black grapes they show,
And make a large dependance from the bough.
Thus have I sung of fields, and flocks, and trees,
And of the waxen work of labouring bees;
While mighty Cæsar, thundering from afar,
Seeks on Euphrates' banks the spoils of war;
With conquering arts asserts his country's cause,
With arts of peace the willing people draws;
On the glad earth the golden age renews,
And his great father's path to heaven pursues;
While I at Naples pass my peaceful days,
Affecting studies of less noisy praise;
And, bold through youth, beneath the beechen shade,
The lays of shepherds, and their loves, have played.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] Note I.

[19] Dr Carey reads, "through the race of life they quickly run," and has altered the punctuation to the sense thus conveyed; but I retain the reading of the first edition—though—which is clearly the meaning of Virgil. The original is as follows:

Ergo ipsas quamvis angusti terminus ævi
Excipiat, neque enim plus septima ducitur æstas,
At genus immortale manet, &c.

[20] The first edition has grandsons.

[21] By the list of errata to the first edition, we are directed to read, "lizards shunning light;" but as lizards had been mentioned in the preceding couplet, the correction itself seems erroneous. I follow Dr Carey in rejecting it.

[22] Note II.

[23] Dr Carey proposes to read will seem, according to the second edition, and to adapt the whole sentence to that construction; but the present tense seems more poetical, as placing the manœuvres of Proteus more vividly before Aristæus. If Dryden thought of adopting the future, he did not complete his purpose. I have therefore followed the original edition.

[24] Note III.

[25] This whole line is taken from the Marquis of Normanby's translation.—Dryden.

[26] Dr Carey reads relent; but repent is here used in a well known scriptural sense; not as expressing remorse, but simple pity.

[27] Poet-king, in Dr Carey's edition: but the original edition reads as above.

NOTES
ON
GEORGICS, IV.

Note I.

That, when the youthful prince—P. 99.

My most ingenious friend, Sir Henry Shere, has observed, through a glass-hive, that the young prince of the bees, or heir presumptive of the crown, approaches the king's apartment with great reverence; and, for three successive mornings, demands permission to lead forth a colony of that year's bees. If his petition be granted, (which he seems to make by humble hummings,) the swarm arises under his conduct. If the answer be, le roi s'avisera,—that is, if the old monarch think it not convenient for the public good to part with so many of his subjects, the next morning the prince is found dead before the threshold of the palace.

Note II.

Encompassed with her sea-green sisters round.—P. 112.

The poet here records the names of fifteen river-nymphs; and for once I have translated them all; but, in the Æneïs, I thought not myself obliged to be so exact; for, in naming many men, who were killed by heroes, I have omitted some, which would not sound in English verse.

Note III.

——Orpheus' dying prayers at length are heard.—P. 117.

The Episode of Orpheus and Eurydice begins here, and contains the only machine which Virgil uses in the "Georgics." I have observed, in the epistle before the Æneïs, that our author seldom employs machines but to adorn his poem, and that the action which they seemingly perform, is really produced without them. Of this nature is the legend of the bees restored by miracle; when the receipt, which the poet gives, would do the work without one. The only beautiful machine which I remember in the modern poets, is in Ariosto, where God commands St Michael to take care, that Paris, then besieged by the Saracens, should be succoured by Rinaldo. In order to do this, he enjoins the archangel to find Silence and Discord; the first to conduct the Christian army to relieve the town, with so much secrecy, that their march should not be discovered; the latter to enter the camp of the infidels, and there to sow dissention among the principal commanders. The heavenly messenger takes his way to an ancient monastery; not doubting there to find Silence in her primitive abode; but, instead of Silence finds Discord: the monks, being divided into factions about the choice of some new officer, were at snic and snee with their drawn knives. The satire needs no explanation. And here it may be also observed, that ambition, jealousy, and worldly interest, and point of honour, had made variance both in the cloister and the camp; and strict discipline had done the work of Silence, in conducting the Christian army to surprise the Turks.

ÆNEIS.

TO
THE MOST HONOURABLE
JOHN,
LORD MARQUIS OF NORMANBY,
EARL OF MULGRAVE,[28] &c.
AND
KNIGHT OF THE MOST NOBLE ORDER OF THE GARTER.

A heroic poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform. The design of it is to form the mind to heroic virtue by example. It is conveyed in verse, that it may delight, while it instructs: the action of it is always one, entire, and great. The least and most trivial episodes, or under-actions, which are interwoven in it, are parts either necessary or convenient to carry on the main design; either so necessary, that, without them, the poem must be imperfect, or so convenient, that no others can be imagined more suitable to the place in which they are. There is nothing to be left void in a firm building; even the cavities ought not to be filled with rubbish, (which is of a perishable kind, destructive to the strength,) but with brick or stone, though of less pieces, yet of the same nature, and fitted to the crannies. Even the least portions of them must be of the epic kind: all things must be grave, majestical, and sublime; nothing of a foreign nature, like the trifling novels, which Ariosto,[29] and others, have inserted in their poems; by which the reader is misled into another sort of pleasure, opposite to that which is designed in an epic poem. One raises the soul, and hardens it to virtue; the other softens it again, and unbends it into vice.

One conduces to the poet's aim, the completing of his work, which he is driving on, labouring and hastening in every line; the other slackens his pace, diverts him from his way, and locks him up, like a knight-errant, in an enchanted castle, when he should be pursuing his first adventure. Statius, as Bossu has well observed, was ambitious of trying his strength with his master Virgil, as Virgil had before tried his with Homer. The Grecian gave the two Romans an example, in the games which were celebrated at the funerals of Patroclus. Virgil imitated the invention of Homer, but changed the sports. But both the Greek and Latin poet took their occasions from the subject; though, to confess the truth, they were both ornamental, or, at best, convenient parts of it, rather than of necessity arising from it. Statius, who, through his whole poem, is noted for want of conduct and judgment, instead of staying, as he might have done, for the death of Capaneus, Hippomedon, Tydeus, or some other of his seven champions, (who are heroes all alike,) or more properly for the tragical end of the two brothers, whose exequies the next successor had leisure to perform when the siege was raised, and in the interval betwixt the poet's first action and his second—went out of his way, as it were on prepense malice, to commit a fault. For he took his opportunity to kill a royal infant by the means of a serpent, (that author of all evil,) to make way for those funeral honours which he intended for him. Now, if this innocent had been of any relation to his Thebaïs—if he had either furthered or hindered the taking of the town—the poet might have found some sorry excuse at least, for detaining the reader from the promised siege. On these terms, this Capaneus of a poet engaged his two immortal predecessors; and his success was answerable to his enterprise.[30]

If this œconomy must be observed in the minutest parts of an epic poem, which, to a common reader, seem to be detached from the body, and almost independent of it; what soul, though sent into the world with great advantages of nature, cultivated with the liberal arts and sciences, conversant with histories of the dead, and enriched with observations on the living, can be sufficient to inform the whole body of so great a work? I touch here but transiently, without any strict method, on some few of those many rules of imitating nature, which Aristotle drew from Homer's Iliads and Odysseys, and which he fitted to the drama; furnishing himself also with observations from the practice of the theatre, when it flourished under Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles: for the original of the stage was from the epic poem. Narration, doubtless, preceded acting, and gave laws to it: what at first was told artfully, was, in process of time, represented gracefully to the sight and hearing. Those episodes of Homer, which were proper for the stage, the poets amplified each into an action; out of his limbs they formed their bodies; what he had contracted, they enlarged; out of one Hercules, were made infinity of pygmies, yet all endued with human souls; for from him, their great creator, they have each of them the divinæ particulam auræ. They flowed from him at first, and are at last resolved into him. Nor were they only animated by him, but their measure and symmetry was owing to him. His one, entire, and great action, was copied by them according to the proportions of the drama. If he finished his orb within the year, it sufficed to teach them, that their action being less, and being also less diversified with incidents, their orb, of consequence, must be circumscribed in a less compass, which they reduced within the limits either of a natural or an artificial day; so that, as he taught them to amplify what he had shortened, by the same rule, applied the contrary way, he taught them to shorten what he had amplified. Tragedy is the miniature of human life; an epic poem is the draught at length.[31] Here, my lord, I must contract also; for, before I was aware, I was almost running into a long digression, to prove, that there is no such absolute necessity that the time of a stage action should so strictly be confined to twenty-four hours, as never to exceed them, for which Aristotle contends, and the Grecian stage has practised. Some longer space, on some occasions, I think, may be allowed, especially for the English theatre, which requires more variety of incidents than the French. Corneille himself, after long practice, was inclined to think, that the time allotted by the ancients was too short to raise and finish a great action: and better a mechanic rule were stretched or broken, than a great beauty were omitted. To raise, and afterwards to calm the passions—to purge the soul from pride, by the examples of human miseries, which befal the greatest—in few words, to expel arrogance, and introduce compassion, are the great effects of tragedy; great, I must confess, if they were altogether as true as they are pompous. But are habits to be introduced at three hours' warning? are radical diseases so suddenly removed? A mountebank may promise such a cure, but a skilful physician will not undertake it. An epic poem is not in so much haste: it works leisurely; the changes which it makes are slow; but the cure is likely to be more perfect. The effects of tragedy, as I said, are too violent to be lasting. If it be answered, that, for this reason, tragedies are often to be seen, and the dose to be repeated, this is tacitly to confess, that there is more virtue in one heroic poem, than in many tragedies. A man is humbled one day, and his pride returns the next. Chemical medicines are observed to relieve oftener than to cure: for it is the nature of spirits to make swift impressions, but not deep. Galenical decoctions, to which I may properly compare an epic poem, have more of body in them; they work by their substance and their weight. It is one reason of Aristotle's to prove, that tragedy is the more noble, because it turns in a shorter compass; the whole action being circumscribed within the space of four-and-twenty hours. He might prove as well, that a mushroom is to be preferred before a peach, because it shoots up in the compass of a night. A chariot may be driven round the pillar in less space than a large machine, because the bulk is not so great. Is the Moon a more noble planet than Saturn, because she makes her revolution in less than thirty days, and he in little less than thirty years? Both their orbs are in proportion to their several magnitudes; and, consequently, the quickness or slowness of their motion, and the time of their circumvolutions, is no argument of the greater or less perfection. And, besides, what virtue is there in a tragedy, which is not contained in an epic poem, where pride is humbled, virtue rewarded, and vice punished; and those more amply treated, than the narrowness of the drama can admit? The shining quality of an epic hero, his magnanimity, his constancy, his patience, his piety, or whatever characteristical virtue his poet gives him, raises first our admiration. We are naturally prone to imitate what we admire; and frequent acts produce a habit. If the hero's chief quality be vicious, as, for example, the choler and obstinate desire of vengeance in Achilles, yet the moral is instructive: and, besides, we are informed in the very proposition of the Iliads, that this anger was pernicious; that it brought a thousand ills on the Grecian camp. The courage of Achilles is proposed to imitation, not his pride and disobedience to his general, nor his brutal cruelty to his dead enemy, nor the selling his body to his father.[32] We abhor these actions while we read them; and what we abhor, we never imitate. The poet only shews them, like rocks or quicksands, to be shunned.

By this example, the critics have concluded, that it is not necessary the manners of the hero should be virtuous. They are poetically good, if they are of a piece; though, where a character of perfect virtue is set before us, it is more lovely; for there the whole hero is to be imitated. This is the Æneas of our author; this is that idea of perfection in an epic poem, which painters and statuaries have only in their minds, and which no hands are able to express. These are the beauties of a god in a human body. When the picture of Achilles is drawn in tragedy, he is taken with those warts, and moles, and hard features, by those who represent him on the stage, or he is no more Achilles; for his creator, Homer, has so described him. Yet even thus he appears a perfect hero, though an imperfect character of virtue. Horace paints him after Homer, and delivers him to be copied on the stage with all those imperfections.[33] Therefore they are either not faults in a heroic poem, or faults common to the drama. After all, on the whole merits of the cause, it must be acknowledged, that the epic poem is more for the manners, and tragedy for the passions. The passions, as I have said, are violent; and acute distempers require medicines of a strong and speedy operation. Ill habits of the mind are like chronical diseases, to be corrected by degrees, and cured by alteratives; wherein, though purges are sometimes necessary, yet diet, good air, and moderate exercise, have the greatest part. The matter being thus stated, it will appear, that both sorts of poetry are of use for their proper ends. The stage is more active; the epic poem works at greater leisure, yet is active too, when need requires; for dialogue is imitated by the drama, from the more active parts of it. One puts off a fit, like the quinquina, and relieves us only for a time; the other roots out the distemper, and gives a healthful habit. The sun enlightens and cheers us, dispels fogs, and warms the ground with his daily beams; but the corn is sowed, increases, is ripened, and is reaped for use in process of time, and in its proper season. I proceed, from the greatness of the action, to the dignity of the actors; I mean to the persons employed in both poems. There likewise tragedy will be seen to borrow from the epopee; and that which borrows is always of less dignity, because it has not of its own. A subject, it is true, may lend to his sovereign; but the act of borrowing makes the king inferior, because he wants, and the subject supplies. And suppose the persons of the drama wholly fabulous, or of the poet's invention, yet heroic poetry gave him the examples of that invention, because it was first, and Homer the common father of the stage. I know not of any one advantage which tragedy can boast above heroic poetry, but that it is represented to the view, as well as read, and instructs in the closet, as well as on the theatre. This is an uncontended excellence, and a chief branch of its prerogative; yet I may be allowed to say, without partiality, that herein the actors share the poet's praise. Your lordship knows some modern tragedies which are beautiful on the stage, and yet I am confident you would not read them. "Tryphon the stationer"[34] complains, they are seldom asked for in his shop. The poet who flourished in the scene, is damned in the ruelle;[35] nay more, he is not esteemed a good poet by those, who see and hear his extravagancies with delight. They are a sort of stately fustian, and lofty childishness. Nothing but nature can give a sincere pleasure; where that is not imitated, it is grotesque painting; "the fine woman ends in a fishes tail."

I might also add, that many things, which not only please, but are real beauties in the reading, would appear absurd upon the stage; and those not only the speciosa miracula, as Horace calls them, of transformations, of Scylla, Antiphates, and the Læstrygons, which cannot be represented even in operas; but the prowess of Achilles or Æneas would appear ridiculous in our dwarf-heroes of the theatre. We can believe they routed armies, in Homer or in Virgil; but ne Hercules contra duos in the drama. I forbear to instance in many things, which the stage cannot, or ought not to represent; for I have said already more than I intended on this subject, and should fear it might be turned against me, that I plead for the pre-eminence of epic poetry, because I have taken some pains in translating Virgil, if this were the first time that I had delivered my opinion in this dispute. But I have more than once already maintained the rights of my two masters against their rivals of the scene,[36] even while I wrote tragedies myself, and had no thoughts of this present undertaking. I submit my opinion to your judgement, who are better qualified than any man I know, to decide this controversy. You come, my lord, instructed in the cause, and needed not that I should open it. Your "Essay of Poetry,"[37] which was published without a name, and of which I was not honoured with the confidence, I read over and over with much delight, and as much instruction, and, without flattering you, or making myself more moral than I am—not without some envy. I was loth to be informed how an epic poem should be written, or how a tragedy should be contrived and managed, in better verse, and with more judgment, than I could teach others. A native of Parnassus, and bred up in the studies of its fundamental laws, may receive new lights from his contemporaries; but it is a grudging kind of praise which he gives his benefactors. He is more obliged, than he is willing to acknowledge; there is a tincture of malice in his commendations; for where I own I am taught, I confess my want of knowledge. A judge upon the bench may, out of good nature, or at least interest, encourage the pleadings of a puny counsellor; but he does not willingly commend his brother serjeant at the bar, especially when he controuls his law, and exposes that ignorance which is made sacred by his place. I gave the unknown author his due commendation, I must confess; but who can answer for me, and for the rest of the poets who heard me read the poem, whether we should not have been better pleased to have seen our own names at the bottom of the title-page? Perhaps we commended it the more, that we might seem to be above the censure. We are naturally displeased with an unknown critic, as the ladies are with a lampooner, because we are bitten in the dark, and know not where to fasten our revenge. But great excellencies will work their way through all sorts of opposition. I applauded rather out of decency, than affection; and was ambitious, as some yet can witness, to be acquainted with a man, with whom I had the honour to converse, and that almost daily, for so many years together. Heaven knows, if I have heartily forgiven you this deceit. You extorted a praise, which I should willingly have given, had I known you. Nothing had been more easy, than to commend a patron of a long standing. The world would join with me, if the encomiums were just; and, if unjust, would excuse a grateful flatterer. But to come anonymous upon me, and force me to commend you against my interest, was not altogether so fair, give me leave to say, as it was politic; for, by concealing your quality, you might clearly understand how your work succeeded, and that the general approbation was given to your merit, not your titles. Thus, like Apelles, you stood unseen behind your own Venus, and received the praises of the passing multitude; the work was commended, not the author; and I doubt not, this was one of the most pleasing adventures of your life.[38]

I have detained your lordship longer than I intended in this dispute of preference betwixt the epic poem and the drama, and yet have not formally answered any of the arguments which are brought by Aristotle on the other side, and set in the fairest light by Dacier. But I suppose, without looking on the book, I may have touched on some of the objections; for, in this address to your lordship, I design not a treatise of heroic poetry, but write in a loose epistolary way, somewhat tending to that subject, after the example of Horace, in his First Epistle of the Second Book to Augustus Cæsar, and in that to the Piso's, which we call his "Art of Poetry;" in both of which he observes no method that I can trace, whatever Scaliger the father, or Heinsius, may have seen, or rather think they had seen. I have taken up, laid down, and resumed as often as I pleased, the same subject; and this loose proceeding I shall use through all this prefatory dedication. Yet all this while I have been sailing with some side-wind or other toward the point I proposed in the beginning,—the greatness and excellency of a heroic poem, with some of the difficulties which attend that work. The comparison, therefore, which I made betwixt the epopee and the tragedy, was not altogether a digression; for it is concluded on all hands, that they are both the master-pieces of human wit.

In the mean time, I may be bold to draw this corollary from what has been already said, that the file of heroic poets is very short; all are not such who have assumed that lofty title in ancient or modern ages, or have been so esteemed by their partial and ignorant admirers.

There have been but one great Ilias, and one Æneïs, in so many ages. The next, but the next with a long interval betwixt, was the Jerusalem;[39]

I mean not so much in distance of time, as in excellency. After these three are entered, some lord-chamberlain should be appointed, some critic of authority should be set before the door, to keep out a crowd of little poets, who press for admission, and are not of quality. Mævius would be deafening your lordship's ears with his

Fortunam Priami cantabo, et nobile bellum—

mere fustian, as Horace would tell you from behind, without pressing forward, and more smoke than fire. Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto,[40] would cry out, "make room for the Italian poets, the descendants of Virgil in a right line:" father Le Moine, with his saint Louis; and Scudery with his Alaric, for a godly king and a Gothic conqueror; and Chapelain would take it ill that his Maid should be refused a place with Helen and Lavinia.[41] Spencer[42] has a better plea for his "Fairy Queen," had his action been finished, or had been one; and Milton, if the devil had not been his hero, instead of Adam; if the giant had not foiled the knight, and driven him out of his strong-hold, to wander through the world with his lady errant; and if there had not been more machining persons than human in his poem. After these, the rest of our English poets shall not be mentioned. I have that honour for them which I ought to have; but, if they are worthies, they are not to be ranked amongst the three whom I have named, and who are established in their reputation.

Before I quitted the comparison betwixt epic poetry and tragedy, I should have acquainted my judge with one advantage of the former over the latter, which I now casually remember out of the preface of Ségrais before his translation of the Æneïs, or out of Bossu, no matter which: "The style of the heroic poem is, and ought to be, more lofty than that of the drama." The critic is certainly in the right, for the reason already urged; the work of tragedy is on the passions, and in a dialogue; both of them abhor strong metaphors, in which the epopee delights. A poet cannot speak too plainly on the stage: for volat irrevocabile verbum; the sense is lost, if it be not taken flying. But what we read alone, we have leisure to digest; there an author may beautify his sense by the boldness of his expression, which if we understand not fully at the first, we may dwell upon it, till we find the secret force and excellence. That which cures the manners by alterative physic, as I said before, must proceed by insensible degrees; but that which purges the passions, must do its business all at once, or wholly fail of its effect, at least in the present operation, and without repeated doses. We must beat the iron while it is hot, but we may polish it at leisure. Thus, my lord, you pay the fine of my forgetfulness; and yet the merits of both causes are where they were, and undecided, till you declare whether it be more for the benefit of mankind to have their manners in general corrected, or their pride and hard-heartedness removed.

I must now come closer to my present business, and not think of making more invasive wars abroad, when, like Hannibal, I am called back to the defence of my own country. Virgil is attacked by many enemies; he has a whole confederacy against him; and I must endeavour to defend him as well as I am able. But their principal objections being against his moral, the duration or length of time taken up in the action of the poem, and what they have to urge against the manners of his hero; I shall omit the rest as mere cavils of grammarians; at the worst, but casual slips of a great man's pen, or inconsiderable faults of an admirable poem, which the author had not leisure to review before his death. Macrobius has answered what the ancients could urge against him; and some things I have lately read in Tanneguy le Fèvre, Valois, and another whom I name not, which are scarce worth answering. They begin with the moral of his poem, which I have elsewhere confessed, and still must own, not to be so noble as that of Homer.[43] But let both be fairly stated; and, without contradicting my first opinion, I can shew, that Virgil's was as useful to the Romans of his age, as Homer's was to the Grecians of his, in what time soever he may be supposed to have lived and flourished. Homer's moral was to urge the necessity of union, and of a good understanding betwixt confederate states and princes engaged in a war with a mighty monarch; as also of discipline in an army, and obedience in the several chiefs to the supreme commander of the joint forces. To inculcate this, he sets forth the ruinous effects of discord in the camp of those allies, occasioned by the quarrel betwixt the general and one of the next in office under him. Agamemnon gives the provocation, and Achilles resents the injury. Both parties are faulty in the quarrel; and accordingly they are both punished: the aggressor is forced to sue for peace to his inferior on dishonourable conditions: the deserter refuses the satisfaction offered; and his obstinacy costs him his best friend. This works the natural effect of choler, and turns his rage against him by whom he was last affronted, and most sensibly. The greater anger expels the less; but his character is still preserved. In the mean time, the Grecian army receives loss on loss, and is half destroyed by a pestilence into the bargain:

Quidquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi.

As the poet, in the first part of the example, had shewn the bad effects of discord, so, after the reconcilement, he gives the good effects of unity; for Hector is slain, and then Troy must fall. By this it is probable, that Homer lived when the Median monarchy was grown formidable to the Grecians, and that the joint endeavours of his countrymen were little enough to preserve their common freedom from an encroaching enemy. Such was his moral, which all critics have allowed to be more noble than that of Virgil, though not adapted to the times in which the Roman poet lived. Had Virgil flourished in the age of Ennius, and addressed to Scipio, he had probably taken the same moral, or some other not unlike it: for then the Romans were in as much danger from the Carthaginian commonwealth, as the Grecians were from the Assyrian or Median monarchy. But we are to consider him as writing his poem in a time when the old form of government was subverted, and a new one just established by Octavius Cæsar, in effect by force of arms, but seemingly by the consent of the Roman people. The commonwealth had received a deadly wound in the former civil wars betwixt Marius and Sylla. The commons, while the first prevailed, had almost shaken off the yoke of the nobility; and Marius and Cinna, like the captains of the mob, under the specious pretence of the public good, and of doing justice on the oppressors of their liberty, revenged themselves, without form of law, on their private enemies. Sylla, in his turn, proscribed the heads of the adverse party: he too had nothing but liberty and reformation in his mouth; (for the cause of religion is but a modern motive to rebellion, invented by the Christian priesthood, refining on the heathen;[44]) Sylla, to be sure, meant no more good to the Roman people than Marius before him, whatever he declared; but sacrificed the lives, and took the estates, of all his enemies, to gratify those who brought him into power. Such was the reformation of the government by both parties. The senate and the commons were the two bases on which it stood; and the two champions of either faction, each, destroyed the foundations of the other side; so the fabric, of consequence, must fall betwixt them, and tyranny must be built upon their ruins. This comes of altering fundamental laws and constitutions—like him, who, being in good health, lodged himself in a physician's house, and was over-persuaded by his landlord to take physic, (of which he died,) for the benefit of his doctor. Stavo ben: (was written on his monument) ma, per star meglio, sto quì.

After the death of those two usurpers, the commonwealth seemed to recover, and held up its head for a little time. But it was all the while in a deep consumption, which is a flattering disease. Pompey, Crassus, and Cæsar, had found the sweets of arbitrary power; and, each being a check to the other's growth, struck up a false friendship amongst themselves, and divided the government betwixt them, which none of them was able to assume alone. These were the public-spirited men of their age; that is, patriots for their own interest. The commonwealth looked with a florid countenance in their management, spread in bulk, and all the while was wasting in the vitals. Not to trouble your lordship with the repetition of what you know—after the death of Crassus, Pompey found himself outwitted by Cæsar, broke with him, overpowered him in the senate, and caused many unjust decrees to pass against him. Cæsar, thus injured, and unable to resist the faction of the nobles which was now uppermost, (for he was a Marian,) had recourse to arms; and his cause was just against Pompey, but not against his country, whose constitution ought to have been sacred to him, and never to have been violated on the account of any private wrong. But he prevailed; and, heaven declaring for him, he became a providential monarch, under the title of perpetual dictator. He being murdered by his own son,[45] whom I neither dare commend, nor can justly blame, (though Dante, in his Inferno, has put him and Cassius, and Judas Iscariot betwixt them, into the great devil's mouth,) the commonwealth popped up its head for the third time, under Brutus and Cassius, and then sunk for ever.

Thus the Roman people were grossly gulled twice or thrice over, and as often enslaved in one century, and under the same pretence of reformation. At last the two battles of Philippi gave the decisive stroke against liberty; and, not long after, the commonwealth was turned into a monarchy, by the conduct and good fortune of Augustus. It is true, that the despotic power could not have fallen into better hands than those of the first and second Cæsar. Your lordship well knows what obligations Virgil had to the latter of them: he saw, beside, that the commonwealth was lost without resource; the heads of it destroyed; the senate new moulded, grown degenerate, and either bought off, or thrusting their own necks into the yoke, out of fear of being forced. Yet I may safely affirm for our great author, (as men of good sense are generally honest,) that he was still of republican principles in his heart.

Secretosque pios, his dantem jura Catonem.[46]

I think, I need use no other argument to justify my opinion, than that of this one line, taken from the eighth book of the Æneïs. If he had not well studied his patron's temper, it might have ruined him with another prince. But Augustus was not discontented, at least that we can find, that Cato was placed, by his own poet, in Elysium, and there giving laws to the holy souls who deserved to be separated from the vulgar sort of good spirits; for his conscience could not but whisper to the arbitrary monarch, that the kings of Rome were at first elective, and governed not without a senate;—that Romulus was no hereditary prince; and though, after his death, he received divine honours for the good he did on earth, yet he was but a god of their own making;—that the last Tarquin was expelled justly for overt acts of tyranny, and mal-administration; for such are the conditions of an elective kingdom: and I meddle not with others, being, for my own opinion, of Montaigne's principles, that an honest man ought to be contented with that form of government, and with those fundamental constitutions of it, which he received from his ancestors, and under which himself was born; though at the same time he confessed freely, that, if he could have chosen his place of birth, it should have been at Venice—which, for many reasons, I dislike, and am better pleased to have been born an Englishman.

But, to return from my long rambling—I say, that Virgil having maturely weighed the condition of the times in which he lived; that an entire liberty was not to be retrieved; that the present settlement had the prospect of a long continuance in the same family, or those adopted into it; that he held his paternal estate from the bounty of the conqueror, by whom he was likewise enriched, esteemed, and cherished; that this conqueror, though of a bad kind, was the very best of it; that the arts of peace flourished under him; that all men might be happy, if they would be quiet; that, now he was in possession of the whole, yet he shared a great part of his authority with the senate; that he would be chosen into the ancient offices of the commonwealth, and ruled by the power which he derived from them, and prorogued his government from time to time, still, as it were, threatening to dismiss himself from public cares, which he exercised more for the common good, than for any delight he took in greatness;—these things, I say, being considered by the poet, he concluded it to be the interest of his country to be so governed; to infuse an awful respect into the people towards such a prince; by that respect to confirm their obedience to him, and by that obedience to make them happy. This was the moral of his divine poem;[47]—honest in the poet; honourable to the emperor, whom he derives from a divine extraction; and reflecting part of that honour on the Roman people, whom he derives also from the Trojans; and not only profitable, but necessary, to the present age, and likely to be such to their posterity. That it was the received opinion, that the Romans were descended from the Trojans, and Julius Cæsar from Iülus the son of Æneas, was enough for Virgil; though perhaps he thought not so himself, or that Æneas ever was in Italy; which Bochartus manifestly proves. And Homer, where he says that Jupiter hated the house of Priam, and was resolved to transfer the kingdom to the family of Æneas, yet mentions nothing of his leading a colony into a foreign country, and settling there. But that the Romans valued themselves on their Trojan ancestry, is so undoubted a truth, that I need not prove it. Even the seals which we have remaining of Julius Cæsar, which we know to be antique, have the star of Venus over them, (though they were all graven after his death,) as a note that he was deified. I doubt not but one reason, why Augustus should be so passionately concerned for the preservation of the Æneïs, which its author had condemned to be burnt, as an imperfect poem, by his last will and testament, was, because it did him a real service, as well as an honour; that a work should not be lost, where his divine original was celebrated in verse, which had the character of immortality stamped upon it.

Neither were the great Roman families, which flourished in his time, less obliged by him than the emperor. Your lordship knows with what address he makes mention of them, as captains of ships, or leaders in the war; and even some of Italian extraction are not forgotten. These are the single stars which are sprinkled through the Æneïs: but there are whole constellations of them in the fifth book. And I could not but take notice, when I translated it, of some favourite families to which he gives the victory and awards the prizes, in the person of his hero, at the funeral games which were celebrated in honour of Anchises. I insist not on their names; but am pleased to find the Memmii amongst them, derived from Mnestheus, because Lucretius dedicates to one of that family, a branch of which destroyed Corinth. I likewise either found or formed an image to myself of the contrary kind; that those, who lost the prizes, were such as had disobliged the poet, or were in disgrace with Augustus, or enemies to Mæcenas; and this was the poetical revenge he took: for genus irritabile vatum, as Horace says.[48] When a poet is thoroughly provoked, he will do himself justice, however dear it cost him; animamque in vulnere ponit. I think these are not bare imaginations of my own, though I find no trace of them in the commentators; but one poet may judge of another by himself. The vengeance we defer, is not forgotten. I hinted before, that the whole Roman people were obliged by Virgil, in deriving them from Troy; an ancestry which they affected. We and the French are of the same humour: they would be thought to descend from a son, I think, of Hector; and we would have our Britain both named and planted by a descendant of Æneas. Spenser favours this opinion what he can. His Prince Arthur, or whoever he intends by him, is a Trojan. Thus the hero of Homer was a Grecian, of Virgil a Roman, of Tasso an Italian.

I have transgressed my bounds, and gone farther than the moral led me; but, if your lordship is not tired, I am safe enough.

Thus far, I think, my author is defended. But, as Augustus is still shadowed in the person of Æneas, (of which I shall say more, when I come to the manners which the poet gives his hero,) I must prepare that subject, by shewing how dexterously he managed both the prince and people, so as to displease neither, and to do good to both; which is the part of a wise and an honest man, and proves, that it is possible for a courtier not to be a knave. I shall continue still to speak my thoughts like a free-born subject, as I am; though such things, perhaps, as no Dutch commentator could, and I am sure no Frenchman durst. I have already told your lordship my opinion of Virgil, that he was no arbitrary man. Obliged he was to his master for his bounty; and he repays him with good counsel, how to behave himself in his new monarchy, so as to gain the affections of his subjects, and deserve to be called the father of his country. From this consideration it is, that he chose, for the ground-work of his poem, one empire destroyed, and another raised from the ruins of it. This was just the parallel. Æneas could not pretend to be Priam's heir in a lineal succession; for Anchises, the hero's father, was only of the second branch of the royal family; and Helenus, a son of Priam, was yet surviving, and might lawfully claim before him. It may be, Virgil mentions him on that account. Neither has he forgotten Priamus, in the fifth of his Æneïs, the son of Polites, youngest son to Priam, who was slain by Pyrrhus, in the second book. Æneas had only married Creüsa, Priam's daughter, and by her could have no title, while any of the male issue were remaining. In this case, the poet gave him the next title, which is that of an elective king. The remaining Trojans chose him to lead them forth, and settle them in some foreign country. Ilioneus, in his speech to Dido, calls him expressly by the name of king. Our poet, who all this while had Augustus in his eye, had no desire he should seem to succeed by any right of inheritance derived from Julius Cæsar, (such a title being but one degree removed from conquest,) for what was introduced by force, by force may be removed. It was better for the people that they should give, than he should take; since that gift was indeed no more at bottom, than a trust. Virgil gives us an example of this in the person of Mezentius: he governed arbitrarily; he was expelled, and came to the deserved end of all tyrants. Our author shows us another sort of kingship, in the person of Latinus: he was descended from Saturn, and, as I remember, in the third degree. He is described a just and gracious prince, solicitous for the welfare of his people, always consulting with his senate to promote the common good. We find him at the head of them, when he enters into the council-hall, speaking first, but still demanding their advice, and steering by it, as far as the iniquity of the times would suffer him. And this is the proper character of a king by inheritance, who is born a father of his country. Æneas, though he married the heiress of the crown, yet claimed no title to it during the life of his father-in-law. Pater arma Latinus habeto, &c. are Virgil's words. As for himself, he was contented to take care of his country gods, who were not those of Latium; wherein our divine author seems to relate to the after-practice of the Romans, which was to adopt the gods of those they conquered, or received as members of their commonwealth. Yet, withal, he plainly touches at the office of the high-priesthood, with which Augustus was invested, and which made his person more sacred and inviolable, than even the tribunitial power. It was not therefore for nothing, that the most judicious of all poets made that office vacant by the death of Panthûs in the second book of the Æneïs, for his hero to succeed in it, and consequently for Augustus to enjoy. I know not that any of the commentators have taken notice of that passage. If they have not, I am sure they ought; and if they have, I am not indebted to them for the observation. The words of Virgil are very plain—

Sacra, suosque tibi commendat Troja penates.

As for Augustus, or his uncle Julius, claiming by descent from Æneas, that title is already out of doors. Æneas succeeded not, but was elected. Troy was fore-doomed to fall for ever.

Postquam res Asiæ Priamique evertere gentem
Immeritam visum superis.—Æneïs, Lib. III. v. 1.

Augustus, it is true, had once resolved to rebuild that city, and there to make the seat of empire: but Horace writes an ode on purpose to deter him from that thought; declaring the place to be accursed, and that the gods would as often destroy it, as it should be raised.[49] Hereupon the emperor laid aside a project so ungrateful to the Roman people. But by this, my lord, we may conclude, that he had still his pedigree in his head, and had an itch of being thought a divine king, if his poets had not given him better counsel.

I will pass by many less material objections, for want of room to answer them: what follows next is of great importance, if the critics can make out their charge; for it is levelled at the manners which our poet gives his hero, and which are the same which were eminently seen in his Augustus. Those manners were, piety to the gods and a dutiful affection to his father, love to his relations, care of his people, courage and conduct in the wars, gratitude to those who had obliged him, and justice in general to mankind.

Piety, as your lordship sees, takes place of all, as the chief part of his character; and the word in Latin is more full than it can possibly be expressed in any modern language; for there it comprehends not only devotion to the gods, but filial love, and tender affection to relations of all sorts. As instances of this, the deities of Troy, and his own Penates, are made the companions of his flight: they appear to him in his voyage, and advise him; and at last he replaces them in Italy, their native country. For his father, he takes him on his back: he leads his little son: his wife follows him; but, losing his footsteps through fear or ignorance, he goes back into the midst of his enemies to find her, and leaves not his pursuit until her ghost appears, to forbid his farther search. I will say nothing of his duty to his father while he lived, his sorrow for his death, of the games instituted in honour of his memory, or seeking him, by his command, even after his death, in the Elysian fields. I will not mention his tenderness for his son, which everywhere is visible—of his raising a tomb for Polydorus, the obsequies for Misenus, his pious remembrance of Deïphobus, the funerals of his nurse, his grief for Pallas, and his revenge taken on his murderer, whom otherwise, by his natural compassion, he had forgiven: and then the poem had been left imperfect; for we could have had no certain prospect of his happiness, while the last obstacle to it was unremoved. Of the other parts which compose his character, as a king, or as a general, I need say nothing; the whole Æneïs is one continued instance of some one or other of them; and where I find any thing of them taxed, it shall suffice me, as briefly as I can, to vindicate my divine master to your lordship, and by you to the reader. But herein Ségrais, in his admirable preface to his translation of the Æneïs, as the author of the Dauphin's Virgil justly calls it, has prevented me. Him I follow, and what I borrow from him, am ready to acknowledge to him. For, impartially speaking, the French are as much better critics than the English, as they are worse poets. Thus we generally allow, that they better understand the management of a war than our islanders; but we know we are superior to them in the day of battle. They value themselves on their generals, we on our soldiers. But this is not the proper place to decide that question, if they make it one. I shall perhaps say as much of other nations, and their poets, excepting only Tasso; and hope to make my assertion good, which is but doing justice to my country; part of which honour will reflect on your lordship, whose thoughts are always just; your numbers harmonious, your words chosen, your expressions strong and manly, your verse flowing, and your turns as happy as they are easy. If you would set us more copies, your example would make all precepts needless. In the mean time, that little you have written is owned, and that particularly by the poets, (who are a nation not over lavish of praise to their contemporaries,) as a principal ornament of our language; but the sweetest essences are always confined in the smallest glasses.

When I speak of your lordship, it is never a digression, and therefore I need beg no pardon for it; but take up Ségrais where I left him, and shall use him less often than I have occasion for him; for his preface is a perfect piece of criticism, full and clear, and digested into an exact method; mine is loose, and, as I intended it, epistolary. Yet I dwell on many things, which he durst not touch; for it is dangerous to offend an arbitrary master; and every patron, who has the power of Augustus, has not his clemency. In short, my lord, I would not translate him, because I would bring you somewhat of my own. His notes and observations on every book are of the same excellency; and, for the same reason, I omit the greater part.

He takes notice that Virgil is arraigned for placing piety before valour, and making that piety the chief character of his hero. I have said already from Bossu, that a poet is not obliged to make his hero a virtuous man; therefore, neither Homer nor Tasso are to be blamed, for giving what predominant quality they pleased to their first character. But Virgil, who designed to form a perfect prince, and would insinuate that Augustus, whom he calls Æneas in his poem, was truly such, found himself obliged to make him without blemish, thoroughly virtuous; and a thorough virtue both begins and ends in piety. Tasso, without question, observed this before me, and therefore split his hero in two: he gave Godfrey piety, and Rinaldo fortitude, for their chief qualities or manners. Homer, who had chosen another moral, makes both Agamemnon and Achilles vicious; for his design was to instruct in virtue, by shewing the deformity of vice. I avoid repetition of what I have said above. What follows, is translated literally from Ségrais.

"Virgil had considered, that the greatest virtues of Augustus consisted in the perfect art of governing his people; which caused him to reign for more than forty years in great felicity. He considered, that his emperor was valiant, civil, popular, eloquent, politic, and religious; he has given all these qualities to Æneas. But, knowing that piety alone comprehends the whole duty of man towards the gods, towards his country, and towards his relations, he judged, that this ought to be his first character, whom he would set for a pattern of perfection. In reality, they who believe, that the praises which arise from valour are superior to those which proceed from any other virtues, have not considered, (as they ought,) that valour, destitute of other virtues, cannot render a man worthy of any true esteem. That quality, which signifies no more than an intrepid courage, may be separated from many others which are good, and accompanied with many which are ill. A man may be very valiant, and yet impious and vicious. But the same cannot be said of piety, which excludes all ill qualities, and comprehends even valour itself, with all other qualities which are good. Can we, for example, give the praise of valour to a man, who should see his gods prophaned, and should want the courage to defend them? to a man, who should abandon his father, or desert his king, in his last necessity?"

Thus far Ségrais, in giving the preference to piety before valour. I will now follow him, where he considers this valour, or intrepid courage, singly in itself; and this also Virgil gives to his Æneas, and that in a heroical degree.

Having first concluded, that our poet did for the best in taking the first character of his hero from that essential virtue on which the rest depend, he proceeds to tell us, that, in the ten years' war of Troy, he was considered as the second champion of his country, (allowing Hector the first place;) and this, even by the confession of Homer, who took all occasions of setting up his own countrymen the Grecians, and of undervaluing the Trojan chiefs. But Virgil (whom Ségrais forgot to cite) makes Diomede give him a higher character for strength and courage. His testimony is this, in the Eleventh Book:

————————Stetimus tela aspera contra,
Contulimusque manus: experto credite, quantus
In clypeum assurgat, quo turbine torqueat hastam.
Si duo præterea tales Idæa tulisset
Terra viros, ultro Inachias venisset ad urbes
Dardanus, et versis lugeret Græcia fatis.
Quidquid apud duræ cessatum est mœnia Trojæ,
Hectoris Æneæque manu victoria Graiucirc;m
Hæsit, et in decumum vestigia retulit annum.
Ambo animis, ambo insignes præstantibus armis:
Hic pietate prior.———

I give not here my translation of these verses, (though I think I have not ill succeeded in them,) because your lordship is so great a master of the original, that I have no reason to desire you should see Virgil and me so near together; but you may please, my lord, to take notice, that the Latin author refines upon the Greek, and insinuates, that Homer had done his hero wrong, in giving the advantage of the duel to his own countryman; though Diomede was manifestly the second champion of the Grecians; and Ulysses preferred him before Ajax, when he chose him for the companion of his nightly expedition; for he had a headpiece of his own, and wanted only the fortitude of another, to bring him off with safety, and that he might compass his design with honour.

The French translator thus proceeds: "They, who accuse Æneas for want of courage, either understand not Virgil, or have read him slightly; otherwise they would not raise an objection so easy to be answered." Hereupon he gives so many instances of the hero's valour, that to repeat them after him would tire your lordship, and put me to the unnecessary trouble of transcribing the greatest part of the three last Æneids. In short, more could not be expected from an Amadis, a Sir Lancelot, or the whole Round Table, than he performs. Proxima quæque metit gladio, is the perfect account of a knight-errant. "If it be replied," continues Ségrais, "that it was not difficult for him to undertake and achieve such hardy enterprises, because he wore enchanted arms; that accusation, in the first place, must fall on Homer, ere it can reach Virgil." Achilles was as well provided with them as Æneas, though he was invulnerable without them.[50] And Ariosto, the two Tassos, (Bernardo and Torquato,) even our own Spenser—in a word, all modern poets—have copied Homer as well as Virgil: he is neither the first nor last, but in the midst of them; and therefore is safe, if they are so. "Who knows," says Ségrais, "but that his fated armour was only an allegorical defence, and signified no more than that he was under the peculiar protection of the gods? born, as the astrologers will tell us out of Virgil, (who was well versed in the Chaldean mysteries,) under the favourable influence of Jupiter, Venus, and the Sun." But I insist not on this, because I know you believe not there is such an art; though not only Horace and Persius, but Augustus himself, thought otherwise. But, in defence of Virgil, I dare positively say, that he has been more cautious in this particular than either his predecessor, or his descendants: for Æneas was actually wounded, in the Twelfth of the Æneis; though he had the same godsmith[51] to forge his arms as had Achilles. It seems he was no warluck,[52] as the Scots commonly call such men, who, they say, are iron-free, or lead-free. Yet, after this experiment, that his arms were not impenetrable—when he was cured indeed by his mother's help, because he was that day to conclude the war by the death of Turnus—the poet durst not carry the miracle too far, and restore him wholly to his former vigour: he was still too weak to overtake his enemy; yet we see with what courage he attacks Turnus, when he faces and renews the combat. I need say no more; for Virgil defends himself without needing my assistance, and proves his hero truly to deserve that name. He was not then a second-rate champion, as they would have him, who think fortitude the first virtue in a hero. But, being beaten from this hold, they will not yet allow him to be valiant, because he wept more often, as they think, than well becomes a man of courage.

In the first place, if tears are arguments of cowardice, what shall I say of Homer's hero? Shall Achilles pass for timorous, because he wept, and wept on less occasions than Æneas? Herein Virgil must be granted to have excelled his master. For once both heroes are described lamenting their lost loves: Briseïs was taken away by force from the Grecians; Creüsa was lost for ever to her husband. But Achilles went roaring along the salt sea-shore, and, like a booby, was complaining to his mother, when he should have revenged his injury by arms. Æneas took a nobler course; for, having secured his father and his son, he repeated all his former dangers, to have found his wife, if she had been above ground. And here your lordship may observe the address of Virgil; it was not for nothing that this passage was related with all these tender circumstances. Æneas told it; Dido heard it. That he had been so affectionate a husband, was no ill argument to the coming dowager, that he might prove as kind to her. Virgil has a thousand secret beauties, though I have not leisure to remark them.

Ségrais, on this subject of a hero shedding tears, observes, that historians commend Alexander for weeping when he read the mighty actions of Achilles; and Julius Cæsar is likewise praised, when, out of the same noble envy, he wept at the victories of Alexander. But, if we observe more closely, we shall find, that the tears of Æneas were always on a laudable occasion. Thus he weeps out of compassion and tenderness of nature, when, in the temple of Carthage, he beholds the pictures of his friends, who sacrificed their lives in defence of their country. He deplores the lamentable end of his pilot Palinurus, the untimely death of young Pallas his confederate, and the rest, which I omit. Yet, even for these tears, his wretched critics dare condemn him. They make Æneas little better than a kind of St Swithin[53] hero, always raining. One of these censors is bold enough to argue him of cowardice, when, in the beginning of the first book, he not only weeps, but trembles, at an approaching storm—

Extemplo Æneæ solvuntur frigore membra:
Ingemit; et duplices tendens ad sidera palmas, &c.

But to this I have answered formerly, that his fear was not for himself, but for his people. And what can give a sovereign a better commendation, or recommend a hero more to the affection of the reader? They were threatened with a tempest, and he wept; he was promised Italy, and therefore he prayed for the accomplishment of that promise:—all this in the beginning of a storm; therefore he shewed the more early piety, and the quicker sense of compassion. Thus much I have urged elsewhere in the defence of Virgil; and, since, I have been informed by Mr Moyle,[54] a young gentleman whom I can never sufficiently commend, that the ancients accounted drowning an accursed death; so that, if we grant him to have been afraid, he had just occasion for that fear, both in relation to himself and to his subjects. I think our adversaries can carry this argument no farther, unless they tell us, that he ought to have had more

confidence in the promise of the gods; but how was he assured, that he had understood their oracles aright? Helenus might be mistaken; Phœbus might speak doubtfully; even his mother might flatter him, that he might prosecute his voyage, which if it succeeded happily, he should be the founder of an empire; for, that she herself was doubtful of his fortune, is apparent by the address she made to Jupiter on his behalf; to which the god makes answer in these words:

Parce metû, Cytherea: manent immota tuorum
Fata tibi, &c.

notwithstanding which, the goddess, though comforted, was not assured; for, even after this, through the course of the whole Æneïs, she still apprehends the interest which Juno might make with Jupiter against her son. For it was a moot point in heaven, whether he could alter fate, or not. And indeed some passages in Virgil would make us suspect, that he was of opinion Jupiter might defer fate, though he could not alter it; for, in the latter end of the tenth book, he introduces Juno begging for the life of Turnus, and flattering her husband with the power of changing destiny—Tua, qui potes, orsa reflectas! To which he graciously answers:

Si mora præsentis leti, tempusque caduco
Oratur juveni, meque hoc ita ponere sentis,
Tolle fugâ Turnum, atque instantibus eripe fatis.
Hactenus indulsisse vacat. Sin altior istis
Sub precibus venia ulla latet, totumque moveri
Mutarive putas bellum, spes pascis inanes.

But, that he could not alter those decrees, the king of gods himself confesses, in the book above cited, when he comforts Hercules for the death of Pallas, who had invoked his aid, before he threw his lance at Turnus—

———Trojæ sub mænibus altis,
Tot nati cecidere deûm; quin occidit unâ
Sarpedon, mea progenies. Etiam sua Turnum
Fata manent, metasque dati pervenit ad ævi—

where he plainly acknowledges, that he could not save his own son, or prevent the death which he foresaw. Of his power to defer the blow, I once occasionally discoursed with that excellent person Sir Robert Howard,[55] who is better conversant, than any man that I know, in the doctrine of the Stoics; and he set me right, from the concurrent testimony of philosophers and poets, that Jupiter could not retard the effects of fate, even for a moment. For, when I cited Virgil, as favouring the contrary opinion in that verse,

Tolle fugâ Turnum, atque instantibus eripe fatis——

he replied, and, I think, with exact judgment, that, when Jupiter gave Juno leave to withdraw Turnus from the present danger, it was because he certainly foreknew that his fatal hour was not come; that it was in destiny for Juno at that time to save him; and that himself obeyed destiny, in giving her that leave.

I need say no more in justification of our hero's courage, and am much deceived, if he ever be attacked on this side of his character again. But he is arraigned with more shew of reason by the ladies, who will make a numerous party against him, for being false to love, in forsaking Dido. And I cannot much blame them; for, to say the truth, it is an ill precedent for their gallants to follow. Yet, if I can bring him off with flying colours, they may learn experience at her cost, and, for her sake, avoid a cave, as the worst shelter they can chuse from a shower of rain, especially when they have a lover in their company.

In the first place, Ségrais observes with much acuteness, that they who blame Æneas for his insensibility of love when he left Carthage, contradict their former accusation of him, for being always crying, compassionate, and effeminately sensible of those misfortunes which befel others. They give him two contrary characters; but Virgil makes him of a piece, always grateful, always tender-hearted. But they are impudent enough to discharge themselves of this blunder, by laying the contradiction at Virgil's door. He, say they, has shewn his hero with these inconsistent characters, acknowledging and ungrateful, compassionate and hard-hearted, but, at the bottom, fickle and self-interested; for Dido had not only received his weather-beaten troops before she saw him, and given them her protection, but had also offered them an equal share in her dominion—

Vultis et his mecum pariter considere regnis?
Urbem quam statuo, vestra est.

This was an obligement never to be forgotten; and the more to be considered, because antecedent to her love. That passion, it is true, produced the usual effects, of generosity, gallantry, and care to please; and thither we refer them. But, when she had made all these advances, it was still in his power to have refused them; after the intrigue of the cave, (call it marriage, or enjoyment only,) he was no longer free to take or leave; he had accepted the favour, and was obliged to be constant, if he would be grateful.

My lord, I have set this argument in the best light I can, that the ladies may not think I write booty; and perhaps it may happen to me, as it did to Doctor Cudworth,[56] who has raised such strong objections against the being of a God, and Providence, that many think he has not answered them. You may please at least to hear the adverse party. Ségrais pleads for Virgil, that no less than an absolute command from Jupiter could excuse this insensibility of the hero, and this abrupt departure, which looks so like extreme ingratitude. But, at the same time, he does wisely to remember you, that Virgil had made piety the first character of Æneas; and, this being allowed, (as I am afraid it must,) he was obliged, antecedent to all other considerations, to search an asylum for his gods in Italy—for those very gods, I say, who had promised to his race the universal empire. Could a pious man dispense with the commands of Jupiter, to satisfy his passion, or (take it in the strongest sense) to comply with the obligations of his gratitude? Religion, it is true, must have moral honesty for its ground-work, or we shall be apt to suspect its truth; but an immediate revelation dispenses with all duties of morality. All casuists agree, that theft is a breach of the moral law; yet, if I might presume to mingle things sacred with prophane, the Israelites only spoiled the Egyptians, not robbed them, because the propriety was transferred by a revelation to their law-giver. I confess, Dido was a very infidel in this point; for she would not believe, as Virgil makes her say, that ever Jupiter would send Mercury on such an immoral errand. But this needs no answer, at least no more than Virgil gives it—

Fata obstant; placidasque viri Deus obstruit aures.

This notwithstanding, as Ségrais confesses, he might have shewn a little more sensibility when he left her; for that had been according to his character.

But let Virgil answer for himself. He still loved her, and struggled with his inclinations, to obey the gods:

——Curam sub corde premebat,
Multa gemens, magnoque animum labefactus amore.

Upon the whole matter, and humanly speaking, I doubt there was a fault somewhere: and Jupiter is better able to bear the blame, than either Virgil or Æneas. The poet, it seems, had found it out, and therefore brings the deserting hero and the forsaken lady to meet together in the lower regions, where he excuses himself when it is too late; and accordingly she will take no satisfaction, nor so much as hear him. Now Ségrais is forced to abandon his defence, and excuses his author, by saying, that the Æneïs is an imperfect work, and that death prevented the divine poet from reviewing it; and for that reason he had condemned it to the fire;[57] though, at the same time, his two translators must acknowledge, that the Sixth Book is the most correct of the whole Æneïs. Oh! how convenient is a machine sometimes in a heroic poem! This of Mercury is plainly one; and Virgil was constrained to use it here, or the honesty of his hero would be ill-defended. And the fair sex, however, if they had the deserter in their power, would certainly have shewn him no more mercy than the Bacchanals did Orpheus: for, if too much constancy may be a fault sometimes, then want of constancy, and ingratitude after the last favour, is a crime that never will be forgiven. But, of machines, more in their proper place; where I shall shew, with how much judgment they have been used by Virgil; and, in the mean time, pass to another article of his defence, on the present subject; where, if I cannot clear the hero, I hope at least to bring off the poet; for here I must divide their causes. Let Æneas trust to his machine, which will only help to break his fall; but the address is incomparable. Plato, who borrowed so much from Homer, and yet concluded for the banishment of all poets, would at least have rewarded Virgil, before he sent him into exile. But I go farther, and say, that he ought to be acquitted, and deserved, beside, the bounty of Augustus, and the gratitude of the Roman people. If, after this, the ladies will stand out, let them remember, that the jury is not all agreed; for Octavia was of his party, and was of the first quality in Rome; she was also present at the reading of the Sixth Æneïd: and we know not that she condemned Æneas; but we are sure she presented the poet, for his admirable elegy on her son Marcellus.

But let us consider the secret reasons which Virgil had, for thus framing this noble episode, wherein the whole passion of love is more exactly described than in any other poet. Love was the theme of his Fourth Book; and, though it is the shortest of the whole Æneïs, yet there he has given its beginning, its progress, its traverses, and its conclusion; and had exhausted so entirely this subject, that he could resume it but very slightly in the eight ensuing books.

She was warmed with the graceful appearance of the hero; she smothered those sparkles out of decency; but conversation blew them up into a flame. Then she was forced to make a confident of her whom she best might trust, her own sister, who approves the passion, and thereby augments it; then succeeds her public owning it; and, after that, the consummation. Of Venus and Juno, Jupiter and Mercury, I say nothing; for they were all machining work; but, possession having cooled his love, as it increased hers, she soon perceived the change, or at least grew suspicious of a change; this suspicion soon turned to jealousy, and jealousy to rage; then she disdains and threatens, and again is humble, and entreats, and, nothing availing, despairs, curses, and at last becomes her own executioner. See here the whole process of that passion, to which nothing can be added. I dare go no farther, lest I should lose the connection of my discourse.[58]

To love our native country, and to study its benefit and its glory, to be interested in its concerns, is natural to all men, and is indeed our common duty. A poet makes a farther step; for, endeavouring to do honour to it, it is allowable in him even to be partial in its cause; for he is not tied to truth, or fettered by the laws of history. Homer and Tasso are justly praised for chusing their heroes out of Greece and Italy; Virgil indeed made his a Trojan; but it was to derive the Romans and his own Augustus from him. But all the three poets are manifestly partial to their heroes, in favour of their country; for Dares Phrygius reports of Hector, that he was slain cowardly: Æneas, according to the best account, slew not Mezentius, but was slain by him; and the chronicles of Italy tell us little of that Rinaldo d'Este, who conquers Jerusalem in Tasso. He might be a champion of the church; but we know not that he was so much as present at the siege. To apply this to Virgil, he thought himself engaged in honour to espouse the cause and quarrel of his country against Carthage. He knew he could not please the Romans better, or oblige them more to patronize his poem, than by disgracing the foundress of that city. He shews her ungrateful to the memory of her first husband, doting on a stranger; enjoyed, and afterwards forsaken, by him. This was the original, says he, of the immortal hatred betwixt the two rival nations. It is true, he colours the falsehood of Æneas by an express command from Jupiter, to forsake the queen, who had obliged him; but he knew the Romans were to be his readers; and them he bribed, perhaps at the expence of his hero's honesty; but he gained his cause, however, as pleading before corrupt judges. They were content to see their founder false to love; for still he had the advantage of the amour; it was their enemy whom he forsook; and she might have forsaken him, if he had not got the start of her; she had already forgotten her vows to her Sichæus; and varium et mutabile semper femina, is the sharpest satire, in the fewest words, that ever was made on woman-kind; for both the adjectives are neuter, and animal must be understood, to make them grammar. Virgil does well to put those words into the mouth of Mercury. If a god had not spoken them, neither durst he have written them, nor I translated them. Yet the deity was forced to come twice on the same errand; and the second time, as much a hero as Æneas was, he frighted him. It seems he feared not Jupiter so much as Dido; for your lordship may observe, that, as much intent as he was upon his voyage, yet he still delayed it, till the messenger was obliged to tell him plainly, that, if he weighed not anchor in the night, the queen would be with him in the morning—notumque, furens quid femina possit—she was injured; she was revengeful; she was powerful. The poet had likewise before hinted, that the people were naturally perfidious; for he gives their character in the queen, and makes a proverb of Punica fides, many ages before it was invented.

Thus, I hope, my lord, that I have made good my promise, and justified the poet, whatever becomes of the false knight. And sure a poet is as much privileged to lie as an ambassador, for the honour and interest of his country; at least as Sir Henry Wotton has defined.[59]

This naturally leads me to the defence of the famous anachronism, in making Æneas and Dido contemporaries; for it is certain, that the hero lived almost two hundred years before the building of Carthage. One who imitates Boccalini, says, that Virgil was accused before Apollo for this error. The god soon found, that he was not able to defend his favourite by reason; for the case was clear: he therefore gave this middle sentence, that any thing might be allowed to his son Virgil, on the account of his other merits; that, being a monarch, he had a dispensing power, and pardoned him. But, that this special act of grace might never be drawn into example, or pleaded by his puny successors in justification of their ignorance, he decreed for the future, no poet should presume to make a lady die for love two hundred years before her birth. To moralize this story, Virgil is the Apollo who has this dispensing power. His great judgment made the laws of poetry; but he never made himself a slave to them; chronology, at best, is but a cobweb-law, and he broke through it with his weight. They who will imitate him wisely, must chuse, as he did, an obscure and a remote æra, where they may invent at pleasure, and not be easily contradicted. Neither he, nor the Romans, had ever read the Bible, by which only his false computation of times can be made out against him. This Ségrais says in his defence, and proves it from his learned friend Bochartus, whose letter on this subject he has printed at the end of the fourth Æneïd, to which I refer your lordship and the reader. Yet the credit of Virgil was so great, that he made this fable of his own invention pass for an authentic history, or at least as credible as any thing in Homer. Ovid takes it up after him, even in the same age, and makes an ancient heroine of Virgil's new-created Dido; dictates a letter for her, just before her death, to the ungrateful fugitive; and, very unluckily for himself, is for measuring a sword with a man so much superior in force to him, on the same subject. I think I may be judge of this, because I have translated both.[60] The famous author of the "Art of Love" has nothing of his own; he borrows all from a greater master in his own profession; and, which is worse, improves nothing which he finds. Nature fails him; and, being forced to his old shift, he has recourse to witticism. This passes indeed with his soft admirers, and gives him the preference to Virgil in their esteem. But let them like for themselves, and not prescribe to others; for our author needs not their admiration.

The motives that induced Virgil to coin this fable, I have shewed already; and have also begun to shew, that he might make this anachronism, by superseding the mechanic rules of poetry, for the same reason that a monarch may dispense with or suspend his own laws, when he finds it necessary so to do, especially if those laws are not altogether fundamental. Nothing is to be called a fault in poetry, says Aristotle, but what is against the art; therefore a man may be an admirable poet, without being an exact chronologer. Shall we dare, continues Ségrais, to condemn Virgil for having made a fiction against the order of time, when we commend Ovid and other poets, who have made many of their fictions against the order of nature? For what else are the splendid miracles of the Metamorphoses? Yet these are beautiful as they are related, and have also deep learning and instructive mythologies couched under them: but to give, as Virgil does in this episode, the original cause of the long wars betwixt Rome and Carthage, to draw truth out of fiction after so probable a manner, with so much beauty, and so much for the honour of his country, was proper only to the divine wit of Maro; and Tasso, in one of his discourses, admires him for this particularly. It is not lawful, indeed, to contradict a point of history which is known to all the world, as, for example, to make Hannibal and Scipio contemporaries with Alexander; but, in the dark recesses of antiquity, a great poet may and ought to feign such things as he finds not there, if they can be brought to embellish that subject which he treats. On the other side, the pains and diligence of ill poets is but thrown away, when they want the genius to invent and feign agreeably. But, if the fictions be delightful, (which they always are, if they be natural,) if they be of a piece; if the beginning, the middle, and the end, be in their due places, and artfully united to each other, such works can never fail of their deserved success. And such is Virgil's episode of Dido and Æneas; where the sourest critic must acknowledge, that, if he had deprived his Æneïs of so great an ornament because he found no traces of it in antiquity, he had avoided their unjust censure, but had wanted one of the greatest beauties of his poem. I shall say more of this in the next article of their charge against him, which is want of invention. In the mean time, I may affirm, in honour of this episode, that it is not only now esteemed the most pleasing entertainment of the Æneïs, but was so accounted in his own age, and before it was mellowed into that reputation which time has given it; for which I need produce no other testimony, than that of Ovid, his contemporary—

Nec pars ulla magis legitur de corpore toto,
Quam non legitimo fœdere junctus amor—

where, by the way, you may observe, my lord, that Ovid, in those words, Non legitimo fœdere junctus amor, will by no means allow it to be a lawful marriage betwixt Dido and Æneas. He was in banishment when he wrote those verses, which I cite from his letter to Augustus: "You, Sir," saith he, "have sent me into exile for writing my 'Art of Love,' and my wanton Elegies; yet your own poet was happy in your good graces, though he brought Dido and Æneas into a cave, and left them there not over-honestly together. May I be so bold to ask your majesty, is it a greater fault to teach the art of unlawful love, than to shew it in the action?" But was Ovid, the court-poet, so bad a courtier, as to find no other plea to excuse himself, than by a plain accusation of his master? Virgil confessed it was a lawful marriage betwixt the lovers, that Juno the goddess of matrimony had ratified it by her presence; for it was her business to bring matters to that issue. That the ceremonies were short, we may believe; for Dido was not only amorous, but a widow. Mercury himself, though employed on a quite contrary errand, yet owns it a marriage by an inuendo—pulchramque uxorius urbem exstruis. He calls Æneas not only a husband, but upbraids him for being a fond husband, as the word uxorius implies. Now mark a little, if your lordship pleases, why Virgil is so much concerned to make this marriage (for he seems to be the father of the bride himself, and to give her to the bridegroom); It was to make way for the divorce which he intended afterwards; for he was a finer flatterer than Ovid; and I more than conjecture, that he had in his eye the divorce which not long before had passed betwixt the emperor and Scribonia.[61] He drew this dimple in the cheek of Æneas, to prove Augustus of the same family, by so remarkable a feature in the same place. Thus, as we say in our home-spun English proverb, he killed two birds with one stone; pleased the emperor, by giving him the resemblance of his ancestor, and gave him such a resemblance as was not scandalous in that age. For, to leave one wife, and take another, was but a matter of gallantry at that time of day among the Romans. Neque hæc in fœdera veni, is the very excuse which Æneas makes, when he leaves his lady: "I made no such bargain with you at our marriage, to live always drudging on at Carthage: my business was Italy; and I never made a secret of it. If I took my pleasure, had not you your share of it? I leave you free, at my departure, to comfort yourself with the next stranger who happens to be shipwrecked on your coast. Be as kind a hostess as you have been to me; and you can never fail of another husband. In the mean time, I call the gods to witness, that I leave your shore unwillingly; for, though Juno made the marriage, yet Jupiter commands me to forsake you." This is the effect of what he saith, when it is dishonoured out of Latin verse, into English prose. If the poet argued not aright, we must pardon him for a poor blind heathen, who knew no better morals.

I have detained your lordship longer than I intended, on this objection, which would indeed weigh something in a spiritual court; but I am not to defend our poet there. The next, I think, is but a cavil, though the cry is great against him, and hath continued from the time of Macrobius to this present age. I hinted it before. They lay no less than want of invention to his charge—a capital crime, I must acknowledge; for a poet is a maker,[62] as the word signifies; and he, who cannot make, that is, invent, hath his name for nothing. That which makes this accusation look so strange[63] at the first sight, is, that he has borrowed so many things from Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, and others who preceded him. But, in the first place, if invention is to be taken in so strict a sense, that the matter of a poem must be wholly new, and that in all its parts, then Scaliger hath made out, saith Ségrais, that the history of Troy was no more the invention of Homer, than of Virgil. There was not an old woman, or almost a child, but had it in their mouths, before the Greek poet or his friends digested it into this admirable order in which we read it. At this rate, as Solomon hath told us, there is nothing new beneath the sun. Who then can pass for an inventor, if Homer, as well as Virgil, must be deprived of that glory? Is Versailles the less a new building, because the architect of that palace hath imitated others which were built before it? Walls, doors, and windows, apartments, offices, rooms of convenience and magnificence, are in all great houses. So descriptions, figures, fables, and the rest, must be in all heroic poems; they are the common materials of poetry, furnished from the magazine of nature; every poet hath as much right to them, as every man hath to air or water.

Quid prohibetis aquas? Usus communis aquarum est.

But the argument of the work, that is to say, its principal action, the œconomy and disposition of it; these are the things which distinguish copies from originals. The poet, who borrows nothing from others, is yet to be born; he and the Jews' Messias will come together. There are parts of the Æneïs, which resemble some parts both of the Ilias and of the Odysses; as, for example, Æneas descended into hell, and Ulysses had been there before him; Æneas loved Dido, and Ulysses loved Calypso; in few words, Virgil hath imitated Homer's Odysses in his first six books, and, in his six last, the Ilias. But from hence can we infer, that the two poets write the same history? Is there no invention in some other parts of Virgil's Æneïs? The disposition of so many various matters, is not that his own? From what book of Homer had Virgil his episode of Nisus and Euryalus, of Mezentius and Lausus? From whence did he borrow his design of bringing Æneas into Italy? of establishing the Roman empire on the foundations of a Trojan colony? to say nothing of the honour he did his patron, not only in his descent from Venus, but in making him so like her in his best features, that the goddess might have mistaken Augustus for her son. He had indeed the story from common fame, as Homer had his from the Egyptian priestess. Æneadûm genetrix was no more unknown to Lucretius, than to him. But Lucretius taught him not to form his hero, to give him piety or valour for his manners, and both in so eminent a degree, that, having done what was possible for man to save his king and country, his mother was forced to appear to him, and restrain his fury, which hurried him to death in their revenge. But the poet made his piety more successful; he brought off his father and his son; and his gods witnessed to his devotion, by putting themselves under his protection, to be replaced by him in their promised Italy. Neither the invention nor the conduct of this great action were owing to Homer, or any other poet. It is one thing to copy, and another thing to imitate from nature. The copier is that servile imitator, to whom Horace gives no better a name than that of animal; he will not so much as allow him to be a man. Raphael imitated nature; they who copy one of Raphael's pieces, imitate but him; for his work is their original. They translate him, as I do Virgil; and fall as short of him, as I of Virgil. There is a kind of invention in the imitation of Raphael; for, though the thing was in nature, yet the idea of it was his own. Ulysses travelled; so did Æneas: but neither of them were the first travellers; for Cain went into the land of Nod before they were born: and neither of the poets ever heard of such a man. If Ulysses had been killed at Troy, yet Æneas must have gone to sea, or he could never have arrived in Italy. But the designs of the two poets were as different as the courses of their heroes; one went home, and the other sought a home. To return to my first similitude: suppose Apelles and Raphael had each of them painted a burning Troy, might not the modern painter have succeeded as well as the ancient, though neither of them had seen the town on fire? for the draughts of both were taken from the ideas which they had of nature. Cities had been burnt, before either of them were in being. But, to close the simile as I began it; they would not have designed it after the same manner: Apelles would have distinguished Pyrrhus from the rest of all the Grecians, and shewed him forcing his entrance into Priam's palace; there he had set him in the fairest light, and given him the chief place of all his figures; because he was a Grecian, and he would do honour to his country. Raphael, who was an Italian, and descended from the Trojans, would have made Æneas the hero of his piece; and perhaps not with his father on his back, his son in one hand, his bundle of gods in the other, and his wife following; for an act of piety is not half so graceful in a picture, as an act of courage: he would rather have drawn him killing Androgeos, or some other, hand to hand; and the blaze of the fires should have darted full upon his face, to make him conspicuous amongst his Trojans. This, I think, is a just comparison betwixt the two poets, in the conduct of their several designs. Virgil cannot be said to copy Homer; the Grecian had only the advantage of writing first. If it be urged, that I have granted a resemblance in some parts, yet therein Virgil has excelled him. For, what are the tears of Calypso for being left, to the fury and death of Dido? Where is there the whole process of her passion, and all its violent effects to be found, in the languishing episode of the Odysses? If this be to copy, let the critics shew us the same dispositions, features, or colouring, in their original. The like may be said of the descent to hell, which was not of Homer's invention neither; he had it from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. But to what end did Ulysses make that journey? Æneas undertook it by the express commandment of his father's ghost; there he was to show him all the succeeding heroes of his race, and, next to Romulus, (mark, if you please, the address of Virgil,) his own patron, Augustus Cæsar. Anchises was likewise to instruct him, how to manage the Italian war, and how to conclude it with his honour; that is, in other words, to lay the foundations of that empire which Augustus was to govern. This is the noble invention of our author; but it hath been copied by so many sign-post daubers, that now it is grown fulsome, rather by their want of skill, than by the commonness.

In the last place, I may safely grant, that, by reading Homer, Virgil was taught to imitate his invention—that is, to imitate like him; which is no more than if a painter studied Raphael, that he might learn to design after his manner. And thus I might imitate Virgil, if I were capable of writing a heroic poem, and yet the invention be my own: but I should endeavour to avoid a servile copying. I would not give the same story under other names, with the same characters, in the same order, and with the same sequel; for every common reader to find me out at the first sight for a plagiary, and cry,—This I read before in Virgil, in a better language, and in better verse. This is like Merry Andrew on the low rope, copying lubberly the same tricks which his master is so dexterously performing on the high.

I will trouble your lordship but with one objection more, which I know not whether I found in Le Fèvre, or Valais; but I am sure I have read it in another French critic, whom I will not name, because I think it is not much for his reputation.[64] Virgil, in the heat of action—suppose, for example, in describing the fury of his hero in a battle, when he is endeavouring to raise our concernments to the highest pitch—turns short on the sudden into some similitude, which diverts, say they, your attention from the main subject, and mis spends it on some trivial image. He pours cold water into the cauldron, when his business is to make it boil.[65]

This accusation is general against all who would be thought heroic poets; but I think it touches Virgil less than any. He is too great a master of his art, to make a blot which may so easily be hit. Similitudes, as I have said, are not for tragedy, which is all violent, and where the passions are in a perpetual ferment; for there they deaden where they should animate; they are not of the nature of dialogue, unless in comedy: a metaphor is almost all the stage can suffer, which is a kind of similitude comprehended in a word. But this figure has a contrary effect in heroic poetry; there it is employed to raise the admiration, which is its proper business; and admiration is not of so violent a nature as fear or hope, compassion or horror, or any concernment we can have for such or such a person on the stage. Not but I confess, that similitudes and descriptions, when drawn into an unreasonable length, must needs nauseate the reader. Once, I remember, and but once, Virgil makes a similitude of fourteen lines; and his description of Fame is about the same number. He is blamed for both; and I doubt not but he would have contracted them, had he lived to have reviewed his work; but faults are no precedents. This I have observed of his similitudes in general, that they are not placed, as our unobserving critics tell us, in the heat of any action, but commonly in its declining. When he has warmed us in his description as much as possibly he can, then, lest that warmth should languish, he renews it by some apt similitude, which illustrates his subject, and yet palls not his audience. I need give your lordship but one example of this kind, and leave the rest to your observation, when next you review the whole Æneïs in the original, unblemished by my rude translation. It is in the first book, where the poet describes Neptune composing the ocean, on which Æolus had raised a tempest without his permission. He had already chidden the rebellious winds for obeying the commands of their usurping master; he had warned them from the seas; he had beaten down the billows with his mace, dispelled the clouds, restored the sunshine, while Triton and Cymothoë were heaving the ships from off the quick-sands, before the poet would offer at a similitude for illustration:

Ac, veluti magno in populo cum sæpe coorta est
Seditio, sævitque animis ignobile vulgus, Jamque faces et saxa volant; furor arma ministrat;
Tum, pietate gravem ac meritis si forte virum quem
Conspexere, silent, arrectisque auribus adstant;
Ille regit dictis animos, et pectora mulcet:
Sic cunctus pelagi cecidit fragor, æquora postquam
Prospiciens genitor, cæloque invectus aperto,
Flectit equos, currûque volans dat lora secundo.

This is the first similitude which Virgil makes in this poem, and one of the longest in the whole; for which reason I the rather cite it. While the storm was in its fury, any allusion had been improper; for the poet could have compared it to nothing more impetuous than itself; consequently he could have made no illustration. If he could have illustrated, it had been an ambitious ornament out of season, and would have diverted our concernment: nunc non erat his locus; and therefore he deferred it to its proper place.[66]

These are the criticisms of most moment which have been made against the Æneïs by the ancients or moderns. As for the particular exceptions against this or that passage, Macrobius and Pontanus have answered them already. If I desired to appear more learned than I am, it had been as easy for me to have taken their objections and solutions, as it is for a country parson to take the expositions of the fathers out of Junius and Tremellius,[67] and not to have named the authors from whence I had them; for so Ruæus, otherwise a most judicious commentator on Virgil's works, has used Pontanus, his greatest benefactor; of whom he is very silent; and I do not remember that he once cites him.

What follows next, is no objection; for that implies a fault: and it had been none in Virgil, if he had extended the time of his action beyond a year. At least Aristotle has set no precise limits to it. Homer's, we know, was within two months: Tasso, I am sure, exceeds not a summer; and, if I examined him, perhaps he might be reduced into a much less compass. Bossu leaves it doubtful whether Virgil's action were within the year, or took up some months beyond it. Indeed, the whole dispute is of no more concernment to the common reader, than it is to a ploughman, whether February this year had 28 or 29 days in it. But, for the satisfaction of the more curious, (of which number I am sure your lordship is one,) I will translate what I think convenient out of Ségrais, whom perhaps you have not read; for he has made it highly probable, that the action of the Æneïs began in the spring, and was not extended beyond the autumn. And we have known campaigns that have begun sooner, and have ended later.

Ronsard, and the rest whom Ségrais names, who are of opinion, that the action of this poem takes up almost a year and half, ground their calculation thus. Anchises died in Sicily at the end of winter, or beginning of the spring. Æneas, immediately after the interment of his father, puts to sea for Italy. He is surprised by the tempest described in the beginning of the first book; and there it is that the scene of the poem opens, and where the action must commence. He is driven by this storm on the coasts of Afric; he stays at Carthage all that summer, and almost all the winter following, sets sail again for Italy just before the beginning of the spring, meets with contrary winds, and makes Sicily the second time. This part of the action completes the year. Then he celebrates the anniversary of his father's funeral, and shortly after arrives at Cumæ; and from thence his time is taken up in his first treaty with Latinus, the overture of the war, the siege of his camp by Turnus, his going for succours to relieve it, his return, the raising of the siege by the first battle, the twelve days' truce, the second battle, the assault of Laurentum, and the single fight with Turnus; all which, they say, cannot take up less than four or five months more; by which account, we cannot suppose the entire action to be contained in a much less compass than a year and half.

Ségrais reckons another way; and his computation is not condemned by the learned Ruæus, who compiled and published the commentaries on our poet, which we call the Dauphin's Virgil.

He allows the time of the year when Anchises died to be in the latter end of winter, or the beginning of the spring: he acknowledges, that, when Æneas is first seen at sea afterwards, and is driven by the tempest on the coast of Afric, is the time when the action is naturally to begin: he confesses, further, that Æneas left Carthage in the latter end of winter; for Dido tells him in express terms, as an argument for his longer stay,

Quinetiam hiberno moliris sidere classem.

But, whereas Ronsard's followers suppose, that, when Æneas had buried his father, he set sail immediately for Italy, (though the tempest drove him on the coast of Carthage,) Ségrais will by no means allow that supposition, but thinks it much more probable, that he remained in Sicily till the midst of July, or the beginning of August; at which time he places the first appearance of his hero on the sea; and there opens the action of the poem. From which beginning, to the death of Turnus, which concludes the action, there need not be supposed above ten months of intermediate time: for, arriving at Carthage in the latter end of summer, staying there the winter following, departing thence in the very beginning of the spring, making a short abode in Sicily the second time, landing in Italy, and making the war, may be reasonably judged the business but of ten months. To this the Ronsardians reply, that, having been for seven years before in quest of Italy, and having no more to do in Sicily than to inter his father—after that office was performed, what remained for him, but, without delay, to pursue his first adventure? To which Ségrais answers, that the obsequies of his father, according to the rites of the Greeks and Romans, would detain him for many days; that a longer time must be taken up in the refitting of his ships after so tedious a voyage, and in refreshing his weather-beaten soldiers on a friendly coast. These indeed are but suppositions on both sides; yet those of Ségrais seem better grounded: for the feast of Dido, when she entertained Æneas first, has the appearance of a summer's night, which seems already almost ended, when he begins his story; therefore the love was made in autumn: the hunting followed properly when the heats of that scorching country were declining; the winter was passed in jollity, as the season and their love required; and he left her in the latter end of winter, as is already proved. This opinion is fortified by the arrival of Æneas at the mouth of Tyber; which marks the season of the spring; that season being perfectly described by the singing of the birds saluting the dawn, and by the beauty of the place, which the poet seems to have painted expressly in the seventh Æneid:

Aurora in roseis fulgebat lutea bigis,
Cum venti posuere.————
————Variæ, circumque supraque,
Assuetæ ripis volucres, et fluminis alveo,
Æthera mulcebant cantu.———

The remainder of the action required but three months more: for, when Æneas went for succour to the Tuscans, he found their army in a readiness to march, and wanting only a commander: so that, according to this calculation, the Æneïs takes not up above a year complete, and may be comprehended in less compass.

This, amongst other circumstances treated more at large by Ségrais, 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. Now Ilioneus (whom Virgil twice employs in embassies, as the best speaker of the Trojans) attributes that tempest to Orion, in his speech to Dido:

Cum, subito assurgens fluctu, nimbosus Orion—

He must mean either the heliacal, or achronical rising of that sign. The heliacal rising of a constellation is, when it comes from under the rays of the sun, and begins to appear before day-light; the achronical rising, on the contrary, is when it appears at the close of day, and in opposition to the sun's diurnal course.

The heliacal rising of Orion is at present computed to be about the sixth of July; and about that time it is, that he either causes or presages tempests on the seas.

Ségrais has observed farther, that, when Anna counsels Dido to stay Æneas during the winter, she speaks also of Orion—

Dum pelago desævit hiems, et aquosus Orion.

If therefore Ilioneus, according to our supposition, understand the heliacal rising of Orion, Anna must mean the achronical, which the different epithets given to that constellation seem to manifest. Ilioneus calls him nimbosus; Anna, aquosus. He is tempestuous in the summer, when he rises heliacally, and rainy in the winter, when he rises achronically. Your lordship will pardon me for the frequent repetition of these cant words, which I could not avoid in this abbreviation of Ségrais, who, I think, deserves no little commendation in this new criticism.[68]

I have yet a word or two to say of Virgil's machines, from my own observation of them. He has imitated those of Homer, but not copied them. It was established, long before this time, in the Roman religion as well as in the Greek, that there were gods; and both nations, for the most part, worshipped the same deities; as did also the Trojans, from whom the Romans, I suppose, would rather be thought to derive the rites of their religion, than from the Grecians; because they thought themselves descended from them. Each of those gods had his proper office, and the chief of them their particular attendants. Thus Jupiter had in propriety Ganymede and Mercury, and Juno had Iris. It was not for Virgil then to create new ministers: he must take what he found in his religion. It cannot therefore be said, that he borrowed them from Homer, any more than Apollo, Diana, and the rest, whom he uses as he finds occasion for them, as the Grecian poet did; but he invents the occasions for which he uses them. Venus, after the destruction of Troy, had gained Neptune entirely to her party; therefore we find him busy in the beginning of the Æneïs, to calm the tempest raised by Æolus, and afterwards conducting the Trojan fleet to Cumæ in safety, with the loss only of their pilot, for whom he bargains. I name those two examples (amongst a hundred which I omit) to prove, that Virgil, generally speaking, employed his machines in performing those things which might possibly have been done without them. What more frequent than a storm at sea, upon the rising of Orion? What wonder, if, amongst so many ships, there should one be overset, which was commanded by Orontes, though half the winds had not been there which Æolus employed? Might not Palinurus, without a miracle, fall asleep, and drop into the sea, having been over-wearied with watching, and secure of a quiet passage, by his observation of the skies? At least Æneas, who knew nothing of the machine of Somnus, takes it plainly in this sense:

O nimium cælo et pelago confise sereno,
Nudus in ignotâ, Palinure, jacebis arenâ.

But machines sometimes are specious things to amuse the reader, and give a colour of probability to things otherwise incredible. And, besides, it soothed the vanity of the Romans, to find the gods so visibly concerned in all the actions of their predecessors. We, who are better taught by our religion, yet own every wonderful accident, which befals us for the best, to be brought to pass by some special providence of Almighty God, and by the care of guardian angels: and from hence I might infer, that no heroic poem can be writ on the Epicurean principles; which I could easily demonstrate, if there were need to prove it, or I had leisure.[69]

When Venus opens the eyes of her son Æneas, to behold the gods who combated against Troy in that fatal night when it was surprised, we share the pleasure of that glorious vision, (which Tasso has not ill copied in the sacking of Jerusalem.) But the Greeks had done their business, though neither Neptune, Juno, nor Pallas, had given them their divine assistance. The most crude machine which Virgil uses, is in the episode of Camilla, where Opis, by the command of her mistress, kills Aruns. The next is in the twelfth Æneïd, where Venus cures her son Æneas. But, in the last of these, the poet was driven to a necessity; for Turnus was to be slain that very day; and Æneas, wounded as he was, could not have engaged him in single combat, unless his hurt had been miraculously healed. And the poet had considered, that the dittany which she brought from Crete, could not have wrought so speedy an effect, without the juice of ambrosia, which she mingled with it. After all, that his machine might not seem too violent, we see the hero limping after Turnus. The wound was skinned; but the strength of his thigh was not restored. But what reason had our author to wound Æneas at so critical a time? and how came the cuisses to be worse tempered than the rest of his armour, which was all wrought by Vulcan and his journeymen? These difficulties are not easily to be solved, without confessing that Virgil had not life enough to correct his work; though he had reviewed it, and found those errors, which he resolved to mend: but, being prevented by death, and not willing to leave an imperfect work behind him, he ordained, by his last testament, that his Æneïs should be burned. As for the death of Aruns, who was shot by a goddess, the machine was not altogether so outrageous, as the wounding Mars and Venus by the sword of Diomede. Two divinities, one would have thought, might have pleaded their prerogative of impassibility, or at least not have been wounded by any mortal hand; beside that the ιχωρ, which they shed, was so very like our common blood, that it was not to be distinguished from it, but only by the name and colour. As for what Horace says in his Art of Poetry, that no machines are to be used, unless on some extraordinary occasion,

Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus—

that rule is to be applied to the theatre, of which he is then speaking; and means no more than this, that, when the knot of the play is to be untied, and no other way is left for making the discovery; then, and not otherwise, let a god descend upon a rope, and clear the business to the audience: but this has no relation to the machines which are used in an epic poem.

In the last place, for the Dira, or flying pest, which, flapping on the shield of Turnus, and fluttering about his head, disheartened him in the duel, and presaged to him his approaching death, I might have placed it more properly amongst the objections: for the critics, who lay want of courage to the charge of Virgil's hero, quote this passage as a main proof of their assertion. They say our author had not only secured him before the duel, but also, in the beginning of it, had given him the advantage in impenetrable arms, and in his sword; for that of Turnus was not his own, which was forged by Vulcan for his father, but a weapon which he had snatched in haste, and by mistake, belonging to his charioteer Metiscus; that, after all this, Jupiter, who was partial to the Trojan, and distrustful of the event, though he had hung the balance, and given it a jog of his hand to weigh down Turnus, thought convenient to give the Fates a collateral security, by sending the screech-owl to discourage him: for which they quote these words of Virgil,

——Non me tua turbida virtus
Terret, ait: dî me terrent, et Jupiter hostis.[70]

In answer to which, I say, that this machine is one of those which the poet uses only for ornament, and not out of necessity. Nothing can be more beautiful or more poetical than his description of the three Diræ, or the setting of the balance, which our Milton has borrowed from him, but employed to a different end: for, first, he makes God Almighty set the scales for St Gabriel and Satan, when he knew no combat was to follow; then he makes the good angel's scale descend, and the Devil's mount, quite contrary to Virgil, if I have translated the three verses according to my author's sense:

Jupiter ipse duas æquato examine lances
Sustinet; et fata imponit diversa duorum;
Quem damnet labor, et quo vergat pondere letum.

for I have taken these words, quem damnet labor, in the sense which Virgil gives them in another place,—damnabis tu quoque votis,—to signify a prosperous event. Yet I dare not condemn so great a genius as Milton: for I am much mistaken if he alludes not to the text in Daniel, where Belshazzar was put into the balance, and found too light.—This is digression; and I return to my subject. I said above, that these two machines of the balance and the Dira were only ornamental, and that the success of the duel had been the same without them: for, when Æneas and Turnus stood fronting each other before the altar, Turnus looked dejected, and his colour faded in his face, as if he desponded of the victory before the fight; and not only he, but all his party, when the strength of the two champions was judged by the proportion of their limbs, concluded it was impar pugna, and that their chief was overmatched: whereupon Juturna (who was of the same opinion) took this opportunity to break the treaty and renew the war. Juno herself had plainly told the nymph beforehand, that her brother was to fight

Imparibus fatis, nec dîs nec viribus æquis;

so that there was no need of an apparition to fright Turnus: he had the presage within himself of his impending destiny. The Dira only served to confirm him in his first opinion, that it was his destiny to die in the ensuing combat; and in this sense are those words of Virgil to be taken,

——Non me tua turbida virtus
Terret, ait: dî me terrent, et Jupiter hostis.[71]

I doubt not but the adverb solum is to be understood; "It is not your [valour] only that gives me this concernment; but I find also, by this portent, that Jupiter is my enemy:" for Turnus fled before, when his first sword was broken, till his sister supplied him with a better; which indeed he could not use, because Æneas kept him at a distance with his spear. I wonder Ruæus saw not this, where he charges his author so unjustly, for giving Turnus a second sword to no purpose. How could he fasten a blow, or make a thrust, when he was not suffered to approach? Besides, the chief errand of the Dira was to warn Juturna from the field; for she could have brought the chariot again, when she saw her brother worsted in the duel. I might farther add, that Æneas was so eager of the fight, that he left the city, now almost in his possession, to decide his quarrel with Turnus by the sword: whereas Turnus had manifestly declined the combat, and suffered his sister to convey him as far from the reach of his enemy as she could—I say, not only suffered her, but consented to it; for it is plain, he knew her, by these words:

O soror, et dudum agnovi, cum prima per artem
Fœdera turbâsti, teque hæc in bella dedisti;
Et nunc necquidquam fallis dea.——

I have dwelt so long on this subject, that I must contract what I have to say in reference to my translation, unless I would swell my preface into a volume, and make it formidable to your lordship, when you see so many pages yet behind. And indeed what I have already written, either in justification or praise of Virgil, is against myself, for presuming to copy, in my coarse English, the thoughts and beautiful expressions of this inimitable poet, who flourished in an age when his language was brought to its last perfection, for which it was particularly owing to him and Horace. I will give your lordship my opinion, that those two friends had consulted each other's judgment, wherein they should endeavour to excel; and they seem to have pitched on propriety of thought, elegance of words, and harmony of numbers. According to this model, Horace writ his Odes and Epodes: for his Satires and Epistles, being intended wholly for instruction, required another style—

Ornari res ipsa negat, contenta doceri—

and therefore, as he himself professes, are sermoni propiora, nearer prose than verse. But Virgil, who never attempted the lyric verse, is everywhere elegant, sweet, and flowing in his hexameters. His words are not only chosen, but the places in which he ranks them for the sound. He who removes them from the station wherein their master set them, spoils the harmony. What he says of the Sibyl's prophecies, may be as properly applied to every word of his: they must be read in order as they lie; the least breath discomposes them; and somewhat of their divinity is lost. I cannot boast that I have been thus exact in my verses; but I have endeavoured to follow the example of my master, and am the first Englishman, perhaps, who made it his design to copy him in his numbers, his choice of words, and his placing them for the sweetness of the sound. On this last consideration, I have shunned the cæsura as much as possibly I could: for, wherever that is used, it gives a roughness to the verse; of which we can have little need in a language which is overstocked with consonants.[72] Such is not the Latin, where the vowels and consonants are mixed in proportion to each other: yet Virgil judged the vowels to have somewhat of an over-balance, and therefore tempers their sweetness with cæsuras. Such difference there is in tongues, that the same figure, which roughens one, gives majesty to another: and that was it which Virgil studied in his verses. Ovid uses it but rarely; and hence it is that his versification cannot so properly be called sweet, as luscious. The Italians are forced upon it once or twice in every line, because they have a redundancy of vowels in their language. Their metal is so soft, that it will not coin without alloy to harden it. On the other side, for the reason already named, it is all we can do to give sufficient sweetness to our language: we must not only chuse our words for elegance, but for sound; to perform which, a mastery in the language is required; the poet must have a magazine of words, and have the art to manage his few vowels to the best advantage, that they may go the farther. He must also know the nature of the vowels—which are more sonorous, and which more soft and sweet—and so dispose them as his present occasions require: all which, and a thousand secrets of versification beside, he may learn from Virgil, if he will take him for his guide. If he be above Virgil, and is resolved to follow his own verve, (as the French call it,) the proverb will fall heavily upon him:—"Who teaches himself, has a fool for his master."

Virgil employed eleven years upon his Æneïs; yet he left it, as he thought himself, imperfect; which when I seriously consider, I wish, that, instead of three years which I have spent in the translation of his works, I had four years more allowed me to correct my errors, that I might make my version somewhat more tolerable than it is: for a poet cannot have too great a reverence for his readers, if he expects his labours should survive him. Yet I will neither plead my age nor sickness, in excuse of the faults which I have made: that I wanted time, is all that I have to say; for some of my subscribers grew so clamorous, that I could no longer defer the publication. I hope, from the candour of your lordship, and your often experienced goodness to me, that, if the faults are not too many, you will make allowances with Horace:

——si plura nitent in carmine, non ego paucis
Offendar maculis, quas aut incuria fudit,
Aut humana parum cavit natura.—

You may please also to observe, that there is not, to the best of my remembrance, one vowel gaping on another for want of a cæsura, in this whole poem: but, where a vowel ends a word, the next begins either with a consonant, or what is its equivalent; for our W and H aspirate, and our diphthongs, are plainly such. The greatest latitude I take is in the letter Y, when it concludes a word, and the first syllable of the next begins with a vowel. Neither need I have called this a latitude, which is only an explanation of this general rule—that no vowel can be cut off before another, when we cannot sink the pronunciation of it; as he, she, me, I, &c. Virgil thinks it sometimes a beauty to imitate the licence of the Greeks, and leave two vowels opening on each other, as in that verse of the Third Pastoral,

Et succus pecori, et lac subducitur agnis.

But, nobis non licet esse tam disertis, at least if we study to refine our numbers. I have long had by me the materials of an English Prosodia, containing all the mechanical rules of versification, wherein I have treated, with some exactness, of the feet, the quantities, and the pauses. The French and Italians know nothing of the two first; at least their best poets have not practised them. As for the pauses, Malherbe first brought them into France within this last century; and we see how they adorn their Alexandrines. But, as Virgil propounds a riddle, which he leaves unsolved—

Dic, quibus in terris, inscripti nomina regum
Nascantur flores; et Phyllida solus habeto—

so I will give your lordship another, and leave the exposition of it to your acute judgment. I am sure there are few who make verses, have observed the sweetness of these two lines in Cooper's Hill:

Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full—[73]

and there are yet fewer who can find the reason of that sweetness. I have given it to some of my friends in conversation; and they have allowed the criticism to be just. But, since the evil of false quantities is difficult to be cured in any modern language; since the French and the Italians, as well as we, are yet ignorant what feet are to be used in heroic poetry; since I have not strictly observed those rules myself, which I can teach others; since I pretend to no dictatorship among my fellow-poets; since, if I should instruct some of them to make well-running verses, they want genius to give them strength as well as sweetness; and, above all, since your lordship has advised me not to publish that little which I know, I look on your counsel as your command, which I shall observe inviolably, till you shall please to revoke it, and leave me at liberty to make my thoughts public. In the mean time, that I may arrogate nothing to myself, I must acknowledge that Virgil in Latin, and Spenser in English, have been my masters. Spenser has also given me the boldness to make use sometimes of his Alexandrine line, which we call, though improperly, the Pindaric, because Mr Cowley has often employed it in his Odes. It adds a certain majesty to the verse, when it is used with judgment, and stops the sense from overflowing into another line. Formerly the French, like us, and the Italians, had but five feet, or ten syllables, in their heroic verse; but, since Ronsard's time, as I suppose, they found their tongue too weak to support their epic poetry, without the addition of another foot. That indeed has given it somewhat of the run and measure of a trimeter; but it runs with more activity than strength: their language is not strung with sinews, like our English; it has the nimbleness of a greyhound, but not the bulk and body of a mastiff. Our men and our verses overbear them by their weight; and Pondere, non numero, is the British motto. The French have set up purity for the standard of their language; and a masculine vigour is that of ours. Like their tongue, is the genius of their poets, light and trifling in comparison of the English; more proper for sonnets, madrigals, and elegies, than heroic poetry. The turn on thoughts and words is their chief talent; but the epic poem is too stately to receive those little ornaments. 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 Æneïs, than in his Pastorals and Georgics.

Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere manes.

That turn is beautiful indeed; but he employs it in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, not in his great poem. I have used that licence in his Æneïs sometimes; but I own it as my fault. It was given to those who understand no better. It is like Ovid's

Semivirumque bovem, semibovemque virum.

The poet found it before his critics, but it was a darling sin, which he would not be persuaded to reform. The want of genius, of which I have accused the French, is laid to their charge by one of their own great authors, though I have forgotten his name, and where I read it. If rewards could make good poets, their great master[74] has not been wanting on his part in his bountiful encouragements: for he is wise enough to imitate Augustus, if he had a Maro. The triumvir and proscriber had descended to us in a more hideous form than they now appear, if the emperor had not taken care to make friends of him and Horace. I confess, the banishment of Ovid was a blot in his escutcheon: yet he was only banished; and who knows but his crime was capital, and then his exile was a favour? Ariosto, who, with all his faults, must be acknowledged a great poet, has put these words into the mouth of an evangelist:[75] but whether they will pass for gospel now, I cannot tell.