176 Gleanings from the 



fublimity of the king of birds endeared it to him 

 who muft have been confcious that, however mufical 

 and polifhed were his verfes, they feldom foared 

 into the empyrean of poetry. 



If the influences of the fcenery amidft which 

 his home-life was fpent were twofold, fo the 

 landfcapes and the figures with which he peoples 

 them in his poems partake alfo of a double cha- 

 racter. They are at once natural and conven- 

 tional ; natural fb far as they reflected the low-lying 

 paftoral country in the bafm of the Po ; conventional 

 when coloured with reminifcences of Theocritus, 

 and planted in a Sicilian entourage. Befides thefe 

 characteriftics of his verfe, it is frequently fet with 

 fanciful or "otiofe" epithets and animals. Thus 

 lynxes, lions, and lionefles, wild affes, fcaly dragons, 

 painted birds, and the like, frequently adorn its 

 flow. Over and above this poetical furplufage, 

 however, the ftudent of Nature will detect much 

 clofe obfervation, efpecially of birds, in Virgil's 

 lines. Like his own Helenus ("^neid," iii. 361), 

 "he knows the voices of the birds and the omens 

 to be derived from their fwift flight," and we 

 {hall paufe before accufmg him in any of his 

 delineations of bird-life as drawing only upon his 

 imagination, or adding merely conventional touches, 

 left our fancied wifdom fhould incur the charge of 

 foolim cenforioufnefs which Aulus Gellius brings 

 againft one Higinus, who ventured ramly to criti- 

 cize Virgil's ornithology. 1 Wider reading, and more 

 careful ftudy, will, on the contrary, point out more 

 1 Aulus Cell., vi. 6, 5. 



