Excerpt from Georgicon, Liber Secundus: Edited for the Use of Schools

Prose. But Vergil's own countrymen accepted his work as scientific, and Columella, some two genera tions later, classes Vergil with Cato and Varro (plain practical writers on the same subjects) as a standard authority, quotes his verses to support views of his own, and pays him the sincere tribute of imitation by writing in verse 'inspired by his divine example' a book upon gardening to fill up what was wanting to the Georgics.' Even now-a - days those who are com petent to speak, though they might not recommend him as a guide to the British farmer, at any rate testify to the correctness of his observation of rural matters and his genuine acquaintance with the details of the husbandry practised in his own times. More over Vergil himself professes a practical object, and, in the introduction to the poem, invokes Augustus to share his own pity for the husbandmen 'ignorant of the true path' (ignaros view), and to help, like a Providence, to guide them aright'. It would not then be an unnatural, though doubtless an incomplete account of the motive of the poem to suppose that Vergil, born and bred a country man, and sympathising with the depressed condi tion of agriculture in Italy, where the great land owners were absentees and the free labourers and yeomen were dwindling off the land, took in hand to write a manual which should be practical enough to instruct the latter class, and attractive enough to.

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