There is much in the "Georgics " about the intelligent care needed in cultivating the vines, though the vinedresser of those days had not to be constantly abroad with his sulphursprinkler and with the host of chemical messes on which his successor depends in striving with diseases then undreamt of. Nor do the olives appear to have been subject to the decay (though it is an old disease) which necessitates lopping and excision, leaving the tree saved but maimed. The ground round the trunks was broken up by the plough, but the practice came in later of enriching it with rags, unfragrant bales of which, of Oriental origin, disturb the nerves of the sanitary reformer in his holiday on the Riviera. What Lucretius so plainly foretold has come to pass the virgin soil yielded abundantly if only scratched, but every generation has a heavier toil in supplying that which has been taken away. is worried by cranes and wild geese, | had sung all the night as if nothing and noxious weeds, thistles, and wild had happened; the dense foliage of the oats, by mildew, wolves, mice, moles, magnolias must have shielded them. weevils, and harvesting ants, which In the south of Italy such storms "fearful of an indigent old age "take rarely occur; Virgil's experience of a toll upon his store. Also he thinks them doubtless dated from his Manthat he loses somehow by toads, in tuau farming days, as he seems to sugwhich he is mistaken. Furthermore, gest by the personal note which he drought affects his crops, and if not brings into the description. drought, then thunderstorms bringing the horrid hail which rattles and dances on the roof, and ill can the vine-leaves protect the grapes against it. A tremendous wind blows up, tearing the corn from the ground, and whirling it in the air; rain follows, a solid black bank of water which, when it bursts, washes away the crops and blots out in a few minutes the patient toil of the year. Virgil must have seen that sight often in northern Italy, where the cold air from the Alps meets the hot exhalations from the Po, in one spot or another, with fearful consequences, on almost every summer day. No one can tell what it is who has not seen it; once, on the evening of such a storm, all our peasants at Rovato were eating small birds, sixty of which had been found killed. Another time, I went to Roccafranca, the day after a temporale which will be remembered for years; the factor and his wife described to me how they had watched the crashing If the plants of the earth were healthdownfall of hail, consisting of large ier and more vigorous in Virgil's time pieces of jagged ice, for ten minutes; than they are now, no modern cattlenot more. Then it ceased, the thun- blight was ever more destructive than der grew faint, and they went out to the very horrible rinderpest or influsee acres on acres of hay ready for the enza recorded in the third "Georgic." scythe ironed as flat as though a steam Some commentators have thought that roller had passed over it, while the Virgil introduced this episode because swelling wheat ears, severed with a Lucretius had made similar use of the certain neatness from their stalks, plague of Athens. It can hardly be were scattered in all directions. "We doubted, however, that it was based on cried," they said. It was not their the tradition or recollection of a real loss, it was ours; but they had wit- fact. The disease took the form of a nessed the patient human labor be- mysterious malarious epidemic, coming stowed upon these fields where there with unseasonably warm weather, and would be no harvest, and the tragedy affecting even the fishes, as influenza of the thing struck them more keenly in the first year of its appearance than it did me. "And the nightin-affected the trout and carpioni of the gales?" I asked; for a pair of night- Lake of Garda. There is one touch in ingales nest every year close to the house, arriving on the same day in March. The nightingales, I was told, the narrative of which every one has felt the pathos though not every one has recognized the truth - I mean the 66 The reference to the ox that mourns for its | If Hesiod's cry was "Work, work, yoke-fellow and loses spirit and pines work," Virgil added, "Yes, and in away. Our bifolco bears out Virgil's that work you will find the best return correctness. Nor is it strange, if we that human existence can give." come to think of it; the effect of sor- Georgics" is a hymu to labor. If row or even of dulness on animals as rightly read, we see in it also a hymn to on savages, when they feel it, is far more patriotism. The old connection befatal than it is on civilized man. The tween the love of the land and the love many stories of dogs and birds that of our land which is so near the root of died of grief may well be true, as most the matter, and which yet is so far people can recall some instance to the from the thoughts of the town-bred or point. I knew a parrot which hopped nomadic politicians who are inclined to into the room where its master lay claim a monopoly of the patriotism of dead (he was an old French physi- the nineteenth century, was to Virgil cian); after looking at him for some an absolutely real fact. Man in his time, it hopped back again to its perch, simplicity gets to love the familiar fearefused food, and in three days was tures of the landscape round him as dead. Self starvation is not always he loves the familiar faces which he necessary; the Maories die when they saw when he was a child. Then steps determine that they have lived long in the reflection, "Here my fathers enough, even if forced to eat. There died, and here my children will live is probably a psychological state of passive abandonment which kills very soon, but it is hardly ever reached by man when he ceases to be primitive, except when his vitality is lowered by illness and he "gives himself up for lost" the results of which every doctor knows. it when I am dead;" and to this, again, is added, if he have even the smallest piece of ground which he calls his own, the immeasurably strong instinct shared by all creatures, to defend their own nest, their own lair, against all comers. This is the beginning of patriotism, and though it may be called narrow or selfish, it was as good a thing for a man to think of his country thus as to think of her as a scantily dressed female figure on a monument. Virgil himself combined the pride of empire in its loftiest sense with the strong primitive love of his birth-land which he had inherited from his yeoman forefathers. The inspired Vates of the Roman race, he was yet an Italian first; he was indeed the first poet of an United Italy. Apart from that great epidemic, would appear that animals were as liable to suffer then as now; life had even, says the poet, entailed our misfortunes on the bees, of which he gives a deplorable account in their sick condition. The "Georgics" is one of the most faultless of poems; but perhaps a reader here and there has privately regretted that so much stress is laid upon the details of these animal plagues. But Virgil was resolved not to soften any of the lines of his pic- "Rich in crops and rich in heroes," ture, not to "retouch" the photograph; so he described his country, and he was it was a matter of conscence with him contented to sing of crops and of heto be sincere. In spite of drawbacks, roes. He was quite as serious about he deliberately held that the proprietor the first as about the last, quite as sure of a moderate-sized estate (he objected of the majesty of the argument. He to a large acreage) was a person greatly called the husbandman the prop of the to be envied. "Happy the husband- State. The story that he wrote the man if he only knew it!" Life is best "Georgics" at the request of Mecenas judged by its compensations, and of with the fixed purpose of attaching recompensations, both on the lower and tired soldiers to the land awarded to the higher plane, the agriculturist has more than the followers of other callings. His work is its own reward. them is not likely to be true; but the appearance of the work was much more than a mere literary event. Its suc cess was immediate and immense. | this sort of unsentimental taste in Augustus had it read to him four times country concerns that "Il cantor dei bucolici carmi" found an appreciation, not only fervid, but also intelligent and sympathetically critical. running. Though Hesiod was vener- It EVELYN MARTINENGO CESARESCO. From Nature. AUSTRALIA OF LONG AGO. THE physical conditions of the counPloughing and sowing and rural affairs, try during the period of the Diprotodon, Rural economy, rural astronomy, Nototherium, and associated fauna, Homely morality, labor and thrift. differed materially from that which But their affection for these excellent now subsists, for the structure of the things became, little by little, somewhat larger quadrupeds would render them platonic. While the aesthetic aspects incapable of obtaining a subsistence of a country life always appealed to from the short herbage now existing in the Greeks they were not wrought (if the same localities, and it is evident we except Xenophon) to much enthu- that their food was of a large succulent siasm by its practical duties. On the growth, such as is found only in moist other hand, Virgil found an audience climates and marshy land or lake marnot only ready to admire his work as a gins. This view is also supported by great poem, but also to take a lively the fact that on the Darling Downs and interest in it as a farm manual. Nor Peak Downs the associated fossils inhas this engrained Italian interest in cluded crocodile and turtle, so that agricultural operations ever died out. what are now open, grassy plains must There is, for instance, a month in the have been lakes or swamps, into which year when the most highly educated the streams from the adjacent basaltic Italians in Lombardy think by day and hills flowed, and, gradually filling the dream by night of silkworms. Some hollows with detritus, formed level years ago I called in June on the doyen plains. That this gradual filling up of of Italian literature, Cesare Cantù. lakes actually occurred is shown by the The delightful old man greeted me beds of drift which are found in sinkwith his charming cordiality, and began ing wells and in sections exposed by to show me the books which lined his erosion of water-courses; but in all pleasant apartment in the Via Morigi these instances there is evidence that (Milan), but before long came the in- the ancient rainfall was excessive, as evitable question, "E come vanno i even our present wettest seasons are bachi ?" and literary conversation had inadequate to the removal of the quanto retreat from the field. More recently tities of drift which have been the I was at Athens at the same season. result of a single flood in the ancient I had been conversing with the Italian period. On the ridges around the minister about the Acropolis Museum, lakes there existed a forest growth, as Eleusis, Marathon, when he exclaimed many species of opossum have left with a look of ecstatic pride, "Come their bones as evidence; but the timand see my cocoons!" The "ruling ber evidently differed from the present passion "had induced him to educate scanty growth of eucalypti. Whether (as the Italian phrase is) a quantity of the same abundant rainfall extended silkworms in the centre of Athens, and far into the western interior is uncerthere were the cocoons, the finest I tain, but the rivers evidently mainever saw, neatly arranged on tables in tained a luxuriant vegetation adapted the lower quarters of the Italian Lega- to the sustenance of these gigantic tion. It was among people who had animals, as the discovery of a nearly complete skeleton of Diprotodon on | bury River on the east coast, Port the shore of Lake Mulligan, in South Darwin and Cambridge Gulf on the Australia, shows that these animals north-west, and the Pallinup River on lived in this locality, as it is not prob- the south-west of the continent may be able that their bodies could have floated cited as examples. Thus Australia, down the Great River which drained after its first appearance in the form of the interior of the continent through a group of small islands on the east, Lake Eyre. and a larger island on the west, was It is evident that the climate gradu- raised at the close of the Palæozoic ally became dryer, that the rivers nearly period into a continent of at least ceased their flow, and the lakes and double its present area, including marshes became dry land, while the Papua, and with a mountain range of vegetation was reduced to short grasses great altitude. In the Mesozoic times, that no longer sufficed for the subsist-after a grand growth of vegetation ence of the huge Diprotodon and gigan- which formed its coal beds, it was destic kangaroo, though some of the tined to be almost entirely submerged smaller may still survive to keep com- in the Cretaceous sea, but was again pany with the dingo, who, while he resuscitated in the Tertiary period with left the impressions of his teeth in the the geographical form it now presents. bones of the Diprotodon, has shown a Thus its climate at the time of this greater facility for adapting himself to last elevation maintained a magnificent altered conditions. It was in these system of rivers, which drained the days that some of the rivers flowing interior into Spencer's Gulf, but the direct to the coast cut through the gradual decrease in rainfall has dried sandstones into the softer shales be- up these watercourses, and their channeath, and by their erosion formed nels have been nearly obliterated, and considerable valleys bounded by rocky the country changed from one of great cliffs, and when the land was subse- fertility to a comparatively desert intequently depressed the sea flowed in rior which can only be partially reand formed inlets, of which Sydney claimed by the deep boring of artesian Harbor and the entrance to the Hawkes- wells. The Field enclosure was famous in the history of London, and appears in many records formerly as a place of waste and disorder till, for the peace and safety of the neighborhood, it was enclosed and railed in. For some years the place has been occasionally opened during vacation times at the Law Courts, but is now thrown open for all in every season. The provision of regular park-keepers is necessary for peace and order. One memorable incident connected with Lincoln's Inn Fields in the old time is that Lord William Russell, the patriot, was executed there by the express order of King James II., that his execution might be seen from his house in Bloomsbury — a strange illustration of the changes in London during two centuries since that time. METROPOLITAN OPEN SPACES. places opened during a year for the health and recreation of the people make a long list. Most of them are old churchyards and burial-grounds, which form safe and useful recreation-grounds for their neighborhoods, especially for the young. In not a few there are historical memorials, which are in most cases preserved. Two of the latest spaces opened for public use are Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the ground in Tottenham Court Road near the Tabernacle where Whitfield's preaching was once famous, and whose name consecrates the ground, opened with so much ceremony by Sir John Hutton when chairman of the last County Council. The Tabernacle site is redolent of evangelistic memories, from the days of Toplady and Whitfield to the middle of our century. The Lincoln's Inn Leisure Hour. For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents. |
