the _Georgics_, I seem to remember that the poem was overloaded
with spicy merchandise. You might die of it in aromatic pain. As for
Tusser, certainly he is the complete Elizabethan farmer; sooner than
leave anything out he will say it twice; sooner than say it twice, he
will say it three times. Nevertheless he was a good farmer; as poet,
his itch to be quaint and anxiety to find a rhyme combine to make him
difficult. He writes like Old Moore:

Strong yoke for a hog, with a twitcher and rings,
With tar in a tarpot, for dangerous things;
A sheep-mark, a tar-kettle, little or mitch,
Two pottles of tar to a pottle of pitch.

"Mitch" is a desperate rhyme, but nothing to Tusser. He gives you a
league or more of that; all the same, I don't doubt he was a better
farmer than Virgil. More of him anon.

Hesiod also was a better farmer than Virgil, and a poet into the
bargain, though the Mantuan had him there. He prefers terseness to
eloquence, is on the dry side, and avoids ornament as if he was a
Quaker. Such adjectives as he allows himself are Homer's, well-worn
and familiar. The sea is _atrugetos_, Zeus _hypsibremetès_, the earth
_polyboteirè_, the hawk _tanysipteros_, and so on. They have no more
effect upon you than the egg-and-dart mouldings on your cornices. His
own tropes are more curious than beautiful, but I cannot deny
their charm. The spring, with him, is always _gray_--[Greek: polion
ear]--which is exact for the moment when the breaking leaf-buds are no
more than a mist over the woodlands. You shall begin your harvesting--

When the House-carrier shuns the Pleiades,