There can be no doubt but Virgil had been an attentive reader of Xenophon, of Hesiod, of Cato, and of Varro; otherwise he certainly would have been unworthy of the task he had undertaken,--that of laying down the rules of good husbandry in a way that should insure the reading of them, and kindle a love for the pursuit. I suspect that Virgil was not only a reader of all that had been written on the subject, but that he was also an insistant questioner of every sagacious landholder and every sturdy farmer that he fell in with, whether on the Campanian hills or at the house of Mæcenas. How else does a man accomplish himself for a didactic work relating to matters of fact? I suspect, moreover, that Virgil, during those half-dozen years in which he was engaged upon this task, lost no opportunity of inspecting every bee-hive that fell in his way, of measuring the points and graces of every pretty heifer he saw in the fields, and of noting with the eye of an artist the color of every furrow that glided from the plough. It is inconceivable that a man of his intellectual address should have given so much of literary toil to a work that was not in every essential fully up to the best practice of the day. Five years, it is said, were given to the accomplishment of this short poem. What say our poetasters to this? Fifteen hundred days, we will suppose, to less than twice as many lines; blocking out four or five for his morning's task, and all the evening--for he was a late worker--licking them into shape, as a bear licks her cubs. But _cui bono_? what good is in it all? Simply as a work of art, it will be cherished through all time,--an earlier Titian, whose color can never fade. It was, besides, a most beguiling peace-note, following upon the rude blasts of war. It gave a new charm to forsaken homesteads. Under the Virgilian leadership, Monte Gennaro and the heights of Tusculum beckon the Romans to the fields; the meadows by reedy Thrasymenus are made golden with doubled crops. The Tarentine sheep multiply around Benacus, and crop close those dark bits of herbage which have been fed by the blood of Roman citizens. Thus much for the magic of the verse; but there is also sound farm-talk in Virgil. I am aware that Seneca, living a few years after him, invidiously objects that he was more careful of his language than of his doctrine, and that Columella quotes him charily,--that the collector of the "Geoponics" ignores him, and that Tull gives him clumsy raillery; but I have yet to see in what respect his system falls short of Columella, or how it differs materially, except in fulness, from the teachings of Crescenzi, who wrote a thousand years and more later. There is little in the poem, save its superstitions, from which a modern farmer can dissent.[14] We are hardly launched upon the first Georgic before we find a pretty suggestion of the theory of rotation,-- "Sic quoque mutatis requiescunt foetibus arva."