During the eighteenth century the didactic precepts of Virgil's Georgics were read as practical guidance by an emerging class of professional farmers, and a set of original vernacular georgics were written on agricultural improvement. Examining Smart's The Hop-Garden, Dodsley's Agriculture, Dyer's The Fleece and Jago's Edge-Hill, I argue that they offer a confident, progressive and scientific approach to land cultivation, revising the inherited attitudes of Virgilian georgic. I suggest, though, that this poetics of improvement provides one reason for the decline of the georgic didactic tradition, as it becomes unable to offer comprehensive instruction on a specialised field of knowledge.
This article examines the use of the Roman satiric dialogue in eighteenth-century political verse. It studies partisan satires that pit their speakers against a cautionary interlocutor (adversarius) in imitation of Horace's Satire 2.1 and Persius' Satire 1. It begins with an overview of Pope's use of the dialogue form in his Imitations of Horace, and his shift in the later 1730s to a model of antagonistic encounter between ideological opponents in the style of Persius. Its main body is an examination of later eighteenth-century satires that find alternative political uses for Persius' dialogue form to those of Pope and the Whig Patriot satirists who followed his lead. It studies Thomas Newcomb's inversion of Pope's Epilogue to the Satires for the purposes of ministerial propaganda; Charles Churchill's variations on the dialogue form under the banner of Wilkesite opposition; and Peter Pindar's comic burlesque of the traditional postures of dialogic satire in One Thousand Seven Hundred and Ninety-Six. The article reveals the Roman dialogue to have been a distinctively flexible framework for eighteenth-century satirists, capable of accommodating positions and arguments on both sides of the partisan divide.
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