116 IIESIOD.

all their counterparts in the directions for making this implement given by Hesiod ; and the learned author of * Lectures on Roman Husbandry ' considers that both the Boeotian and the Roman plough may be identified with the little improved Herault plough, still in use in the south of France.* The storm-piece of the earlier poet, again, is obviously present to the mind of the graphic improver of it in the Augustan age ; though, in place of one point, the latter makes at least half-a-dozen, and works up out of his predecessor's hints a masterpiece of elaborate description. It need scarcely be remarked, for it must strike every reader of these poets, whether at first hand or second, that Virgil constructs his "natural calendar " upon the very model of Hesiod's. He catches the little hints of his model with reference to the bird-scarer who is to follow the plough-track ; about the necessity of stripping to plough or sow; about timing ploughing and seed-time by the setting of the Pleiads ; and about divers other matters of the same rural importance. To quit the first book of the Georgics, we see Hesiod's influence occasionally exerting itself in the third ; for, a jyropos of the sharp-toothed dog which Hesiod prescribes in his ' Works and Days' (604, &c.), and would have the farmer feed well, as a protection from the night- prowling thief, we find a parallel in Virgil : t " Nor last, nor least, the dogs must have their place ! With fattening whey support that honest race : S vift Spartan whelps, Molossian mastiffs bold : With these patrolling, fear not for the fold,

• Eom. Husk, 100-102. f Georg. iii. 403-408.