A modern reader may think the value of his poetry little, if at all enhanced, by the rank which he may claim among the 'scriptores rei rusticae.' It may seem matter for regret that so much of the faculty, which should have given permanent delight to the world, should have been employed in conveying temporary instruction. His very fidelity to the office of a teacher detracts somewhat from his poetic office. Though it satisfies our curiosity to know how the ancient Italians tilled their lands and cultivated the vine, yet this satisfaction is quite distinct from the joy which the poetical treatment of a poetical subject gives to the imagination. It is not as repertories of useful information that the great writers of Greece and Rome are to be studied. Their importance in this way has long since been superseded. Each generation adds to the stock of knowledge in the world, modifies the results arrived at by the preceding generation, and dispenses with the works in which these results have been embodied. But a work of power, stimulating moral and intellectual feeling,--whether in the form of poem, history, speech, or philosophic dialogue,--may acquire from long antiquity even a stronger hold over the imagination than it originally possessed(405). In the didactic poems of Lucretius and Virgil the information conveyed by them possesses permanent value, in so far as it is coloured by human feeling,--in so far as we recognise the passion or affection by which the poet was stirred in acquiring his knowledge and in conveying it to sympathetic readers. And as the scientific enthusiasm of Lucretius animates the driest details of his argument, so the love entertained for his subject by Virgil,--as an Italian, the son of a small Italian land-holder,--
Veneto rusticis parentibus nato inter silvas et frutices educto(406),--
writing for Italians, for whom every detail of farm labour had a fascination unintelligible to us,--brightens with the gleam of human and poetical feeling the technical teaching of the traditional precepts of Italian husbandry. The position of a teacher assumed by him,--a position which no great Greek or English poet could gracefully maintain,--impresses us with the thorough adaptation of the form of the poem to the sober practical understanding of the Italian race. Horace mentions this love of teaching and learning as one of the notes distinguishing the Roman from the Greek genius:--