CHAPTER XII. 



VIRGIL AS AN ORNITHOLOGIST. 



|T is not furprifing that Virgil, with 

 his keen fenfe of natural beauty and 

 exquifite play of fancy, loved to 

 lighten his verfe with the fwift 

 wings and happy fongs of birds. All poets turn 

 naturally to thefe artlefs fongfters. But Virgil's 

 lines betray here and there that he loved and 

 ftudied the ways of his native birds in a manner 

 very unufual in his time. Birds are introduced, 

 indeed, in his pictures of country life, or as illuf- 

 trations of human pathos in the conventional 

 manner of ordinary poets, as he had inherited the 

 cuftom from Homer, and as Pope did in the laft 

 century ; a but the felicitous images and wording 

 of many pafTages fhew that he had clofely ftudied 

 bird-life, and feized upon new and ftriking traits 

 in it for' the embellishment of his poems. Born 

 at Andes, now Pietola, a hamlet near Mantua, 



1 See Pope's celebrated lines, for inftance, on a pheafant in 

 the "Windfor Foreft," and the "lonely woodcock," "clamorous 

 lapwing," and " mounting lark " of the fame pafloral. 



