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.