The Georgics have generally been considered as the poet’s most complete work, and it is here, undoubtedly, that he shows us most of himself,--of his habits, his tastes, and his religious opinions. They are poetical essays on the dignity of labour. Warlike glory was the popular theme of the day; but Virgil detests war, and he seeks to enthrone labour in its place. He looks upon tillage as, in some sort, a war in itself, but of a nobler kind--“a holy war of men against the earth,” as a French writer expresses it.[11] He compares its details, in more than one passage, with those of the camp and of the battle-field. But besides this, the Georgics contain what seems to be a protest against the fashionable atheism of his age. He sets the worship of the gods in the first place of all. “First, pay all reverence to the Powers of heaven”-- is his instruction to his pupils--“From Jove all things begin.” His motto might have been that which the Benedictines in their purer days adopted--“Ora et labora”--“Pray and work.” It has been commonly said that Virgil was in his creed an Epicurean; that he looked upon the gods as beings who, in our English poet’s words, “Lie beside their nectar, careless of mankind.” But a study of his writings will go far to show that such is not the case; that whatever the distinct articles of his creed may have been, he had a deep individual sense of the personal existence of great powers which ruled the affairs of men; that Nature was not to him, as to Lucretius, a mere shrine of hidden mysteries, unlocked to the Epicurean alone, but that he had an eye and a heart for all its riches and beauties, as the “skirts” of a divine glory. In all his verse this feeling shows itself, but nowhere more plainly than in the Georgics. It is said that this particular work was undertaken by the desire of Mæcenas, with the hope of turning the minds of the veteran soldiers, to whom grants of land had been made in return for their services, to a more peaceful ambition in the quiet cultivation of their farms. Whether it had that result may well be doubted: the discharged soldier, however heartily he might take to farming, would scarcely go to a poet as his instructor. The practical influence of these treatises in any way is equally doubtful. “It would be absurd to suppose,” says Dean Merivale, “that Virgil’s verses induced any Roman to put his hand to the plough, or take from his bailiff the management of his own estates; but they served undoubtedly to revive some of the simple tastes and sentiments of the olden time, and perpetuated, amid the vices and corruptions of the Empire, a pure stream of sober and innocent enjoyment.”[12] THE ÆNEID. CHAPTER I. THE SHIPWRECK ON THE COAST OF CARTHAGE.