ing, are required to give a seasoning to retirement, and make us taste the blessing. God has bestowed on your lordship the first of these; and you have bestowed on yourself the second. Eden was not made for beasts, though they were suffered to live in it, but for their master, who studied God in the works of his creation. Neither could the Devil have been happy there with all his knowledge; for he wanted innocence to make him so. brought envy, malice, and ambition, into Paradise, which soured to him the sweetness

of the place.

are, 'tis hell.

try, who are

He

Wherever inordinate affections Such only can enjoy the councapable of thinking when they are there, and have left their passions behind them in the town. Then they are prepared for solitude; and, in that solitude, is prepared for them

Et secura quies, et nescia fallere vita.

As I began this dedication with a verse of Virgil, so I conclude it with another.

The continuance of your health, to enjoy

that happiness which you so well deserve, and which you have provided for yourself, is the sincere and earnest wish of

AN

ESSAY

ON THE

GEORGICS,

BY MR. ADDISON.

VIRGIL IRGIL may be reckoned the first who introduced three new kinds of poetry among the Romans, which he copied after three the greatest masters of Greece. Theocritus and Homer have still disputed for the advantage over him in pastoral and heroics; but I think all are unanimous in giving him the precedence to Hesiod in his Georgics. The truth of it is, the sweetness and rusticity of a pastoral cannot be so well expressed in any other tongue as in the Greek, when rightly mixed and qualified with the Doric dialect; nor can the majesty of a heroic poem any-where appear so well as in this language, which has a natural greatness in it, and

can be often rendered more deep and sonorous by the pronunciation of the Ionians. But, in the middle style, where the writers in both tongues are on a level, we see how far Virgil has excelled all who have written in the same way with him.

There has been abundance of criticism spent on Virgil's Pastorals and Eneïs: but the Georgics are a subject which none of the critics have sufficiently taken into their consideration; most of them passing it over in silence, or casting it under the same head with pastoral; a division by no means proper, unless we suppose the style of a husbandman ought to be imitated in a georgic, as that of a shepherd is in pastoral. But, though the scene of both these poems lies in the same place, the speakers in them are of a quite different character, since the precepts of husbandry are not to be delivered with the simplicity of a ploughman, but with the address of a poet. No rules, therefore, that relate to pastoral, can any way affect the Georgics, which fall under that class of poetry which consists in giving plain and direct instructions to the reader; whether they be moral duties, as those of Theognis and Pythagoras,/ or philosophical speculations, as those of Aratus and Lucretius, or rules of practice, as those of Hesiod and Virgil. Among these different kinds of subjects, that which the Georgic goes upon, is, I think, the meanest and least improving, but the most pleasing and delightful. Precepts of morality, besides the natural corruption of our