June — A Little Virgilian Picture, 179 



habits and ideas from a respectful unwillingness to 

 acknowledge any inferiority in them: but the exact 

 truth about their ways of thinking is still ascertain- 

 able. It is clear that Virgil had much of the sort of 

 vision which belongs to a modern painter. Let us not 

 exaggerate this praise : there is an immense difference 

 between merely writing down the words 'fraxinus in 

 silvis pulcherrima/ and painting an ash-tree well, so as 

 Xo make us see that it is f pulcherrima.' It is easy to say 

 that a bull has a white side and that the herbage he eats 

 is 'pale ;' but it requires an incomparably higher culture 

 of the faculty which perceives color to paint the white 

 bull and the pale herbage in the right tints. However, 

 it may be affirmed with truth that Virgil had the faculty 

 of pictorial sight in the rudimentary state, because he 

 takes notice of the things that painters give their lives 

 to study ; and it is perfectly conceivable, that had he 

 lived in our own time he might have become a painter 

 of rustic subjects, equal to Troyon in breadth and repose, 

 superior to him in delicacy. Here, in two lines, is a 

 picture that really reminds one of Troyon, — it was the 

 recollection of these very verses that made me mention 

 that painter just now, — a picture as highly finished as it 

 can be in so brief a space, the subject being a bull with 

 landscape adjuncts, exactly the kind of subject that 

 Troyon painted with so much simplicity and truth : — 



' Ille, latus niveum molli fultus hyacintho 

 Ilice sub nigra pallentes ruminat herbas.' 



1 He, with his snow-white side resting upon the soft hyacinth, 

 ruminates the pale herbage under the black ilex.' 



