Dehisions of Virgil's Time. 215 



they are yet a new and living generation, not 

 lifeless copies modelled by a mere imitator ; and 

 their beauty and their truth is not that of Greek, 

 but of Italian poetry. Let any one compare the 

 translations of Aratus by other Roman hands, by 

 Cicero, Festus, and Germanicus, with Virgil's first 

 Georgic, and he will not fail to mark the differ- 

 ence between the mere translator and the poet 

 who breathes into the work of his predecessors a 

 new life and an immortal one. There is hardly 

 to be found, in the whole of Virgil's poems, a 

 single allusion to the habits of birds or any other 

 animals which is untrue to fact as we know it 

 from Italian naturalists. Here and there, of 

 course, there are delusions which were the com- 

 mon property of the age. If, for example, he 

 tells us in the fourth Georgic that bees 



oft weigh up tiny stones 

 As light craft ballast in the tossing tide, 

 Wherewith they poise them through the cloudy vast : 



let us remember that the true history of bees has 

 been matter of quite recent discovery. And we 

 may note at the same time that Pliny, a professed 

 naturalist, living at least a generation after Virgil, 



