“Thou, Cæsar, chief, where’er thy choice ordain, To fix ’mid gods thy yet unchosen reign-- Wilt thou o’er cities stretch thy guardian sway, While earth and all her realms thy nod obey? The world’s vast orb shall own thy genial power, Giver of fruits, fair sun, and favouring shower; Before thy altar grateful nations bow, And with maternal myrtle wreathe thy brow. O’er boundless ocean shall thy power prevail, Thee her sole lord the world of waters hail? Rule, where the sea remotest Thule laves, While Tethys dowers thy bride with all her waves? Wilt thou ’mid Scorpius and the Virgin rise, And, a new star, illume thy native skies? Scorpius, e’en now, each shrinking claw confines, And more than half his heaven to thee resigns. Where’er thy reign (for not if hell invite To wield the sceptre of eternal night, Ne’er would such lust of dire dominion move Thee, Cæsar, to resign the realm of Jove: Though vaunting Greece extol th’ Elysian plain, Whence weeping Ceres wooes her child in vain) Breathe favouring gales, my course propitious guide, O’er the rude swain’s uncertain path preside; Now, now invoked, assert thy heavenly birth, And learn to hear our prayers, a god on earth.” --SOTHEBY. The first book is devoted to the raising of corn crops. The farmer is recommended to plough early, to plough deep, and to plough four times over--advice in the principles of which modern farmers would cordially agree. The poet also recommends fallows at least every other season, and not to take two corn crops in successive years. The Roman agriculturist had his pests of the farm, and complained of them as loudly as his modern fellows. The geese, and the cranes, and the mice, and the small birds, vexed him all in turn; and if he knew nothing of that distinctly English torment, the couch-grass,--squitch, twitch, or quitch, as it is variously termed, which is said to spring up under the national footstep wherever it goes, whether at the Cape or in Australia,--he had indigenous weeds of his own which gave him equal trouble to get rid of. The Roman plough seems to have been a cumbrous wooden instrument, which would break the heart alike of man and horse in these days; and its very elaborate description, in spite of the polished language of the poet, would shock one of our modern implement-manufacturers. He gives a few hints as to lucky and unlucky days, and fuller directions for prognosticating the weather from the various signs to be observed in the sky, and in the behaviour of the animal world; and he closes this first division of his poem, as he began it, with an apostrophe to Cæsar as the hope of Rome and Italy. It is one of the finest passages in the Georgics, and will bear translation as well as most. Dryden’s version is spirited enough, and though diffuse, presents the sense fairly to an English ear:--