When from the representations of Nature in Homer, and indeed in all the Greek poets, we turn to the rural descriptions of the Roman poets, we feel that we have passed into a wholly different atmosphere. If there were no other there is at least this cardinal distinction between them:—The Greeks had no antiquity behind them, at least no earlier literature to come between them and the open face of things. They saw at first hand with their own eyes, felt with their own hearts, described in their own words. The Romans, those at least of the literary age, before they wrote a line that has come down to us, had received the whole Hellenic learning and poetry poured in upon them, so that the very air of Italy was colored with the hues of Greece. This makes it so difficult, in studying the productions of any Roman poet—their descriptions of Nature not less than other things—to be sure that you have the features of Italian scenery pure and uncolored, and that they have not been tinged and refracted by the Hellenic medium of associations and language through which they were habitually beheld. No doubt the Romans originally were and never ceased to be a country-loving people. The pictures that have come down to us of Cincinnatus, and of other worthies of the early Republic, represent even their greatest generals and dictators as living on paternal farms in rural thrift and simplicity. But there remains no poetry coeval with that primitive time. Before we reach their poets the day of small estates and patrician life in the fields is over, all Italy is held in vast domains by rich senators who themselves lived in the city, and committed the care of their lands to a bailiff with hordes of slaves.