of the camp and of the battle-field. But besides this, the Georgics contain what seems to be a protest against the fashionable atheism of his age. He sets the worship of the gods in the first place of all.
"First, pay all reverence to the Powers of heaven"—
is his instruction to his pupils—"From Jove all things begin." His motto might have been that which the Benedictines in their purer days adopted—"Ora et labora"—"Pray and work." It has been commonly said that Virgil was in his creed an Epicurean; that he looked upon the gods as beings who, in our English poet's words,
"Lie beside their nectar, careless of mankind."
But a study of his writings will go far to show that such is not the case; that whatever the distinct articles of his creed may have been, he had a deep individual sense of the personal existence of great powers which ruled the affairs of men; that Nature was not to him, as to Lucretius, a mere shrine of hidden mysteries, unlocked to the Epicurean alone, but that he had an eye and a heart for all its riches and beauties, as the "skirts" of a divine glory. In all his verse this feeling shows itself, but nowhere more plainly than in the Georgics.
It is said that this particular work was undertaken by the desire of Mæcenas, with the hope of turning the minds of the veteran soldiers, to whom grants of land had been made in return for their services, to a more peaceful ambition in the quiet cultivation of their
