The student of Virgil may be said to enjoy a singular advantage in the preservation of those works of Greek poetry which his author professes to have imitated. A few fragments are all that is left of that glorious body of lyric song which, after having been the delight of Greece, while Greece was yet a nation, lived again at Rome in the Odes of Horace, inspiring their spirit and dictating their metre. Still more scanty is our knowledge of the poems which are supposed to have served as models for Ovid's Metamorphoses, such as the Hesiodic of Nicander. Not only may we suppose that we have lost the key to many thoughts, images, and phrases, which the possession of the Greek would have enabled us to clear up, but the whole relation of the Latin poems to their originals becomes a matter of inference and of vague conjecture. But in possessing Theocritus, Hesiod, and Homer, we may feel that we possess, as it were, the exciting causes of the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid. They do not indeed represent all the literary influences which must have told upon Virgil's genius, or disclose to us the origin of the peculiar manner in which he has conducted the work of imitation: but they show us what it was that in each successive case first stimulated his general conception of his subject—what it was that he admired in the literature of Greece, and sought to reproduce among his own countrymen: they enable us to judge of him not only as a poet, but as a critic of the poetry of others.