is curious, also, that when society itself has been most artificial, this affectation of pastoral simplicity seems to have been most in vogue. It was the effeminate courtiers of Augustus who lavished their applause and rewards upon Virgil when he read to them these lays of an imaginary shepherd-life; how Galatæa was won by a present of a pair of wood-pigeons or a basket of apples, and how Melibœus thankfully went to supper with his friend Tityrus on roasted chestnuts and goat-milk cheese. Society in England had never less of the reality of pastoral simplicity than in the days when nearly every fine lady chose to be painted with a lamb or a crook--when the “bucolic cant,” as Warton contemptuously terms it, was the fashionable folly of the day. So when aristocratic life in France had reached a phase of corruption which was only to be purged by a revolution, Queen Marie Antoinette, with her ladies and gentlemen in waiting, were going about the farm at Trianon with crooks in their hands, playing at shepherds and shepherdesses, on the brink of that terrible volcano. Of the ten Eclogues, the majority take the form of pastoral dialogue. Frequently it is a singing-match between two rival shepherds--not always conducted in the most amicable fashion, or with the most scrupulous delicacy in the matter of repartee, the poetical “Arcadian” being in this point a pretty faithful copy from nature. Most of the names, as well as of the subjects and imagery, are taken, as has been said, from the Greek Idylls of Theocritus. So closely has Virgil copied his model that he even transplants the natural scenery of Sicily, employed by Theocritus, to his pastoral dreamland, which otherwise would seem to be localised on the banks of the Mincio, in the neighbourhood of his native Mantua. This gives him an opportunity of touching upon subjects of the day, and introducing, in the name and guise of shepherds, himself and his friends. Sometimes we can see through the disguise by the help of contemporary Roman history; more often, probably, the clue is lost to us through our very imperfect modern knowledge. We know pretty well that Tityrus,--who in the First Eclogue expresses his gratitude to the “godlike youth” who has preserved his little farm from the ruthless hands of the soldier colonists, while his poor neighbour Melibœus has lost his all,--can be no other than the poet himself, who thus compliments his powerful protector. So, too, in a later Eclogue, when the slave Mœris meets his neighbour Lycidas on the road, and tells him how his master has been dispossessed of his farm by the military colonists, and has narrowly escaped with his life, we may safely trust the traditional explanation, that in the master Menalcas we have Virgil again, troubled a second time by these intruders, and compelled to renew his application to his great friend at Rome. The traditional story was, that the poet was obliged to take refuge from the violence of the