IMITATORS OF HESIOD. 113

gerated imitation of the Augustan poets. On the whole, it is only between Hesiod and Virgil that solid ground for comparison exists ; and such as institute this comparison will be constrained to admit Mr Conington's conclusion, that the 'Works and Days* as distinctly stimulated Virgil's general conception of the Georgics, as the Idyls of Theocritus that of his Bucolics, or the Iliad and Odyssey that of his ^Eneid. Uncertainty as to the extent of the frag- mentariness of the model undoubtedly bars a confident verdict upon the closeness of the copy. Propertius may have had other and lost works of Hesiod in his mind's eye when he addressed his great contemporary as repeating in song the Ascrsean sage's precepts on vine-culture as well as corn-crops (iii. 26, v. 77). Yet enough of direct imitation survives in the large portion of the first book of the Georgics (wherein Virgil treads common ground) to show that, with many points of contrast, there are also many correspondences between the old Boeotian bard and his smoother Eoman admirer ; and that where Virgil does copy, his copying is as unequivocal as it is instructive for a study of finish and refinement. Each poet takes for his theme the same " glorification of labour " which Dean Meri- vale discerns as the chief aim of the Georgics, the difference consisting in the homeliness of the manner of the Greek poet and the high polish of that of the Roman. Each also recognises the time of man's innocency, when this labour was not yet the law of his being; and the treatment by each of the myth of a golden or Saturnian age is not an inappro- A. c. vol. xv. H