lumella. Walter Harte in his _Essays on Husbandry_ (1764) says
that Cato writes like an English squire and Varro like a French
academician. This is just comment on Cato but it is at once too much
and too little to say of Varro: a French academician might be proud
of his antiquarian learning, but would balk at his awkward and homely
Latin, as indeed one French academician, M. Boissier, has since done.
The real merit of Varro's book is that it is the well digested system
of an experienced and successful farmer who has seen and practised all
that he records.

The authority from which Virgil drew the practical farming lore, for
which he has been extolled in all ages, was Varro: indeed, as a farm
manual the _Georgics_ go astray only when they depart from Varro. It
is worth while to elaborate this point, which Professor Sellar, in his
argument for the originality of Virgil, only suggests.[6]

After Philippi the times were ripe for books on agriculture. The Roman
world had been divided between Octavian and Antony and there was peace
in Italy: men were turning "back to the land."

An agricultural regeneration of Italy was impending, chiefly in
viticulture, as Ferrero has pointed out. With far sighted appreciation
of the economic advantages of this, Octavian determined to promote the
movement, which became one of the completed glories of the Augustan
Age, when Horace sang

Tua, Caesar, aetas
Fruges et agris rettulit uberes.

Varro's book appeared in B.C. 37 and during that year Maecenas
commissioned Virgil to put into verse the spirit of the times; just
as, under similar circumstances, Cromwell pensioned Samuel Hartlib.
Such is the co-incidence of the dates that it is not impossible that
the _Rerum Rusticarum_ suggested the subject of the _Georgics_, either
to Virgil or to Maecenas.

There is no evidence in the _Bucolics_ that Virgil ever had any
practical knowledge of agriculture before he undertook to write the
_Georgics_. His father was, it is true, a farmer, but apparently in a
small way and unsuccessful, for he had to eke out a frugal livelihood
by keeping bees and serving as the hireling deputy of a _viator_ or
constable. This type of farmer persists and may be recognized in any
rural community: but the agricultural colleges do not enlist such
men into their faculties. So it is possible that Virgil owed little
agricultural knowledge to his father's precepts or example. Virgil
perhaps had tended his father's f