VIRGIL THE FARMER.

CONINGTON'S translation of Virgil is as familiar to readers of the classics as the Latin of Virgil him- self, and in certain respects it is hardly likely to be bettered by a successor. No other translator will come closer to the meaning of the original, and no other will write in more grace- ful English. But Conington, for all his grace and scholarship, has his limitations. He imposes them himself when he translates poetry into prose ; and he is prevented by the very delicacy of his genius from interpreting the whole of the spirit of his poet. To take the Georgics, for instance, Conington hears and sees Virgil in the sunlight, among flowers and trees ; he goes with him in all weathers and seasons, and comes as near the earth and the soil of the farm, but he seems to shrink from a certain coarseness of manner and matter which Virgil deliberately chooses on occasion, and which are as surely part of the atmosphere and essence of the Georgics as the freshest and gentlest passages of sun and rain. For that reason readers of Virgil will find a special interest in a new translation of the Georgics which has just been published by Dr. A. S. Way, the translator of many other classics (Macmillan, 2s. 6d. net). Dr. Way has taken verse as his medium, and on the whole his choice is successful.

He has chosen a sort of rough, irregular, docked hexameter, rhyming now two lines and now three ; the last syllable of the final spondee or trochee has been cut, and the lines rhyme on what would have been the penultimate, thus :-

" What of the stormy stars of autumn tide shall I say,

How watchful men must be, when shorter now is the day. . . ."

This blunt ending is occasionally softened or weakened, but the bluntness enables Dr. Way to bring into his translation just the note of plain practicality which belongs to the farmers' work—the hard, every-day, earthy problems which confront the small holder on the land, however clearly he may see and recognize the beauty and simplicity of his life in the air and the sun and rain. What would the small holder of to-day make of the Georgics ? Could he get any kind of valuable instruction from Virgil ? Italian conditions of weather and soil, of course, differ in many respects from English condi- tions, and some of the main crops are crops which we cannot grow—grapes, for instance. An English small holder would not pray, like Virgil's farmer, for a wet summer :- "For drizzling summers and sunny winters, husbandmen, pray ; For a winter of dust with a glorious robe of corn will array Thy glorying field: this, more than all tillage of man, makes proud

makes Gargara marvel bedraped with her golden cloud."

But, after all, we have a farmer's proverb that "a dripping June sets all in tune," and on sandy soils not only farm crops but garden flowers do best in a wet summer. Virgil no doubt writes from personal experience of particular conditions of soil and situation, as he does, too, when discussing the rotation of crops :- " In years alternate withal shalt thou let thy reaped field bide Fallow: the face of the sleeping plain let a hard crust hide. Else, sow 'neath the stars of a diverse season the golden corn Where erst the pods of the glad pulse danced in the wind of

morn, Or where the progeny slender-limbed of the weak vetch climbed ;

Or the frail stalks stood and the bells of the bitter lupine chimed;

Not flax or oats ! for their harvest burns out the sap of the plain, So likewise do poppies drenched with oblivion's slumber-rain. Yet thy toil by rotation is made more light: but forbear not of pride From mulching with fattening dung parched soil, nor from scattering wide The ash-grime over the fields whence the nature and strength has dried.

So also by change of crop land gains the rest that is sought, Nor left unfilled the while is the land, and thankful for naught."

Rotation of crops in Italy and Sicily has always been managed on a much more irregular system than English farmers would approve ; but Virgil's plan, though it cannot be called intensive cultivation, shows that he understands thoroughly the effect on the land of the different crops. He is probably setting down the rotation of crops which was customary on his farm near Mantua, and a recent writer on Italian agriculture, Dr. Ashby, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, gives as a common rotation in Lombardy to-day, "either wheat, clover, maize, rice, rice, rice (the last year manured with lupines), or maize, wheat, followed by clover, clover, clover ploughed in, and rice, rice, rice manured with lupines." The farmer of Lombardy has not gone much further forward than when Virgil sowed corn after lupines and vetches. Or take, again, for a practical test of soils, whether they are heavy or light, the following :— " Choose thou a spot with thine eyes; bid sink thee a pit down deep In ground unbroken ; thereafter throw back all that heap Of mould thereinto, and trample the surface down of the pit. if it sink below the brim, for the gracious vine it is fit And for pasture ; but if it refuse to return to its place again, And when thou hest filled thy trench a mound of earth remain, For a stiff soil's stubborn clods and for massive ridges prepare, And strong be the steers that shall cleave that filth-land with

the share."

But the choice of land is not all; the soil must be broken up by deep trenching, to let in the rain and frost. Sometimes the plants naturally growing in a place give a hint whether 'he soil is cold or poor :—

"Of blasting cold the traces be few In a soil : yet sometimes there pitch-pines and the baleful yew, Or the dark-leaved ivy's spreading fingers shall lend thee a clue. Note all these things, and bethink thee betimes in the sun to dry Thy land, with trenches and furrows to score the hilltop high, And to lay the upturned clods all bare to the north-wind cold, Ere thou plant the vine's glad children. Fields of crumbling mould Be the best : the wind and the chill frost to render them so With the brawny delver who tosseth and stirroth the earth to and fro."

Virgil, like all farmers and gardeners, is full of all kinds of

weather-lore. Storm and sunshine never take the watchful farmer by surprise :—

"Never cometh a storm unheralded. Sometimes, as it rolls through the mountain gorges, the cranes have fled

High-soaring before it : the heifer, her eyes upturned to the sky, With wide-spread nostrils hath snuffed the breeze rushing gustily by: Shrill-crying around the pools the swallow her flight hath been winging : Their immemorial plaint the frogs in the fen have been singing."

Then there is the "clanging rookery "; rooks tell farmers the weather, tumbling and calling in a stormy sky, as surely as seagulls warn the fishermen of a storm by " washing them- selves "—the phrase is the English fisherman's to-day:-

"The battalion of rooks, from their feeding-ground flying, With clashings of wings come thronging, with sound of a multi- tude crying.

All manner of deep-sea birds, and the marish-fowl that feed Through many a pleasant pool in Cayster's Asian mead—

Thou shalt see them with showers of spray their shoulders eagerly splashing, Now meeting the surf with their beads, now into the billows dashing,

And aimlessly revelling on, as it were in a passion of washing."

Writing as a stockbreeder, Virgil has drawn a picture of the kind of horse he likes to see, which has often been quoted and compared with modern standards. He did not hold that "a good horse cannot be of a bad colour "; he liked bays and

greys, and thought that duns and whites were the worst. But his picture of a cow is less familiar :— " The best brood-cow

Bath a lowering look, coarse bead, and a neck that is massive enow,

And down below her knees from her throat doth the dewlap fall. No limit there is to the length of her side, she is huge-framed all, Even her feet. She hath horns incurved, ears shaggy with hair, For her colour, though she be dappled with white flecks— nothing I care,

Nor care though she spurn the yoke, with her horns push

viciously,

Have a head more like to a bull, and a frame throughout built

high, While her tail as she paces is sweeping the dust behind her feet.'

This is the true individual farmer's touch—the farmer talking at an agricultural show, who tells you that he "likes to see" this or that in a beast, and gives you his reasons from personal observation and experience. But Virgil, perhaps, never strikes the note of personal observation more distinctly than when he

is writing, not of horses and cows, but of bees. He is not, of course, strictly scientific; he writes of queens as kings, and he lets his imagination take him strange flights when he writes of bees fighting various remarkable battles. But he has watched and tended bees himself, and knows how they like and dislike certain plants and certain scents; he describes how cockroaches will eat the comb in the skep, and how hornets and moths will rob the honey, and how the bee leaves its sting in the wound and dies from losing its sting; and, for a picture which should appeal to English beekeepers, looking at their experience of the last three years, he gives us the following passage :-

"But if, seeing life cometh laden with sore mischances to bees

As to men, their frames shall droop and pine with woeful

disease—

And this shalt thou straightway discern by no uncertain signs: When they sicken, their colour changetb, with leanness's haggard lines Are their visages marred: the forms of friends that will not see again Life's light, from their homes they bear in mournful funeral- train ; Or in clusters they hang at their portal with clinging feet entwined, Or loiter within behind closed doors, all hunger-pined Unto utter listlessness, and with cramping cold made numb."

That is a picture plainly drawn from experience. Virgil has watched his bees come out upon the flighting board and try to go out to work as usual ; he has noticed how they sink down a few yards away, where they climb and struggle over each other on the ground ("with clinging feet entwined "); he has noticed that their appearance is changed, with wings sticking out awry, and how they gradually become more and more torpid and languid, and eventually die. In fact, he describes as minutely as any writer of his age could, without scientific formulas and conventions, a hive of bees attacked by what has come to be known during the last few years as the " Isle of Wight " bee disease. That is a name which has probably been applied to several distinct bee diseases, and we do not know very much about any of them. It is quite possible, in fact, that Virgil, who prescribes various remedies, among them centaury and the roots of starwort boiled in wine, gave the bee-farmers of his day quite as good advice in treating the disease as our own bee farmers have obtained from modern professional apiarists.