Νήπιοι, οὐδ’ ἴσασιν ὅσῳ πλέον ᾕμισυ παντὸς Οὐδ’ ὅσον ἐν μαλάχη τε καὶ ἀσφοδέλῳ μεγ’ ὔνειας, Κρύψαντες γὰρ ἔχουσι θεοὶ Βίον ἀνθρώποισι. Unhappy they to whom God has not revealed By a strong light which must their sense control, That half a great estate’s more than the whole. Unhappy, from whom still concealed does lie Of roots and herbs the wholesome luxury. This I conceive to have been honest Hesiod’s meaning. From Homer we must not expect much concerning our affairs. He was blind, and could neither work in the country nor enjoy the pleasures of it; his helpless poverty was likeliest to be sustained in the richest places, he was to delight the Grecians with fine tales of the wars and adventures of their ancestors; his subject removed him from all commerce with us, and yet, methinks, he made a shift to show his goodwill a little. For though he could do us no honour in the person of his hero Ulysses (much less of Achilles), because his whole time was consumed in wars and voyages, yet he makes his father Laertes a gardener all that while, and seeking his consolation for the absence of his son in the pleasure of planting and even dunging his own grounds. Yet, see, he did not contemn us peasants; nay, so far was he from that insolence, that he always styles Eumæus, who kept the hogs with wonderful respect, Δῖον ὔφυρβυν, the divine swine-herd; he could have done no more for Menelaus or Agamemnon. And Theocritus (a very ancient poet, but he was one of our own tribe, for he wrote nothing but pastorals) gave the same epithet to a husbandman Εμέιβετο Δῖος ἀγρώτης. The divine husbandman replied to Hercules, who was but Δῖος himself. These were civil Greeks, and who understood the dignity of our calling. Among the Romans, we have in the first place our truly divine Virgil, who, though by the favour of Mæcenas and Augustus he might have been one of the chief men of Rome, yet chose rather to employ much of his time in the exercise, and much of his immortal wit in the praise and instructions of a rustic life; who, though he had written before whole books of Pastorals and Georgics, could not abstain in his great and imperial poem from describing Evander, one of his best princes, as living just after the homely manner of an ordinary countryman. He seats him in a throne of maple, and lays him but upon a bear’s skin, the kine and oxen are lowing in his courtyard, the birds’ under the eaves of his window call him up in the morning; and when he goes abroad only two dogs go along, with him for his guard. At last, when he brings Æneas into his royal cottage, he makes him say this memorable compliment, greater than ever yet was spoken at the Escurial, the Louvre, or our Whitehall. _Hæc_, _inquit_, _limina victor_ _Alcides subiit_, _hæc illum Regia cepit_, _Aude_, _Hospes_, _contemnere opes_, _et te quoque dignum_ _Finge Deo_, _rebusque veni non asper egenis_.