But Virgil seems no where so well pleased, as when he is got among his bees in the fourth Georgic: and ennobles the actions of so trivial a creature, with metaphors drawn from the most important concerns of mankind. His verses are not in a greater noise and hurry in the battles of Æneas and Turnus, than in the engagement of two swarms. And as in his Eneis he

compares the labours of his Trojans to those of bees and pismires, here he compares the labours of the bees to those of the Cyclops. In short, the last Georgic was a good prelude to the Eneis; and very well shewed what the poet could do in the description of what was really great, by his describing the mock-grandeur of an insect with so good a grace. There is more pleasantness in the little platform of a garden, which he gives us about the middle of this book, than in all the spacious walks and water-works of Rapin. The speech of Proteus at the end can never be enough admired, and was, indeed, very fit to conclude so divine a work.

After this particular account of the beauties in the Georgics, I should in the next place endeavour to point out its imperfections, if it has any. But though I think there are some few parts in it that are not so beautiful as the rest, I shall not presume to name them, as rather suspecting my own judgment, than I can believe a fault to be in that poem, which lay so long under Virgil's correction, and had his last hand put to it. The first Georgic was probably burlesqued in the author's life-time; for we still find in the scholiasts a verse that ridicules part of a line translated from Hesiod. Nudus ara, sere nudus-And we may easily guess at the judgment of this extraordinary critic, whoever he was, from his censuring this particular precept. We may be sure Virgil would not have translated it from Hesiod, had he not discovered some beauty in it; and indeed the beauty of it is what I have before observed to be frequently met with in Virgil, the delivering the precept so indirectly, and singling out the particular circumstance of sowing and plowing naked, to suggest to us that these employments are proper only in the hot season of the year.

I shall not here compare the style of the Georgics with that of Lucretius, which the reader may see already done in the preface to the second volume of Miscellany Poems; but shall conclude this poem to be the most complete, elaborate, and finished piece of all antiquity. The Æneis, indeed, is of a nobler kind, but the Georgic is more perfect in its kind. The Eneis has a greater variety of beauties in it, but those of the Georgic are more exquisite. In short, the Georgic has all the perfection that can be expected in a poem written by the greatest poet in the flower of his age, when his invention was ready, his imagination warm, his judgment settled, and all his faculties in their full vigour and maturity,

САТО.

Α

TRAGEDY.

AS IT IS ACTED

AT THE

THEATRE-ROYAL, IN DRURY-LANE,

BY

HIS MAJESTY'S SERVANTS.

Ecce spectaculum dignum, ad quod respiciat, intentus operi suo, Deus! Ecce par Deo dignum, vir fortis cum malâ fortunâ compositus! Non video, inquam, quid habeat in terris Jupiter pulchrius, si convertere animum velit, quàm ut spectet Catonem, jam partibus non semel fractis, nihilominus inter ruinas publicas erectum.

SEN. DE DIVIN. PROV.