or Bloomfield, though we have somewhere seen their names, as poets, set in juxtaposition. He is their master as a poet; he is their superior in simplicity. He is essentially ancient; they are wholly and entirely modern in thought, form, and expression. The didactic style, no doubt, has lent Hesiod's form to many of the compositions of the Augustan period of English literature. "We have had," says Mr Conington, in his introduction to the Georgics, "Essays on Satire, Essays on unnatural Flights in Poetry, Essays on translated Verse, Essays on Criticism, Essays on Man, Arts of preserving Health, Arts of Dancing, and even Arts of Cookery; the Chase, the Fleece, and the Sugar-cane." But, with his usual clear-sightedness, the late Oxford Professor of Latin saw that all these have grasped simply the form, and let go the spirit, of their model. The real parallel is to be found between the Ascræan farmer-poet and the quaint shrewd "British Varro" of the sixteenth century—
"Who sometime made the points of husbandry"—
Thomas Tusser, gentleman: a worthy whose "five hundred points, as well for the champion or open country as for the woodland or several," are quite worth the study of individual readers, not to say of agricultural colleges; so much wisdom, wit, and sound sense do they bring together into verse, which is, in very many characteristics, truly Hesiodian.
Endowed with an ear for music and a taste for farming, a compound of the singing-man (of St Paul's and Norwich cathedrals) and of the Suffolk grazier, a
