the earth being addressed to the future through the ancient work. In other words, the past is entering into dialogue with the future right now." And in part, as in Virgil's time, this ecological crisis has come as a result of a loss of focus, preoccupation in the past with foreign wars and civil conflict. Selected translations in English John Ogilby (1649), first complete Virgil in English including a translation of the Georgicks in couplets John Dryden (London, 1697) in heroic couplets William Sotheby, (London, 1800) in heroic couplets R.D. Blackmore (London, 1871) in heroic couplets Musgrave Wilkins (London, 1873) “a literal translation” in prose James Rhoades (London 1881), blank verse Arthur Way (London, 1912) quantitative verse couplets J. W. Mackail (New York, 1934) prose C. Day-Lewis (London, 1940) quantitative verse Peter Fallon (Oxford World Classics, 2006) quantitative verse Kimberly Johnson (Penguin Classics, 2009) irregular verse European georgics Gardening guides Virgil’s work addressed itself to far more than simple farming and later poems of a didactic tendency often dealt with, and elaborated on, individual subjects mentioned in the course of the Georgics. What has been described as "the earliest English georgic on any subject" limited itself to practical advice on gardening. Attributed to an unidentified Master John, "The Feate of Gardeninge" dates from the first half of the 15th century and provides instructions for sowing, planting and growing fruits, herbs and flowers through the course of the year. The poem’s 98 couplets are of irregular line-length and are occasionally imperfectly rhymed; the work was never printed, although annotated manuscript copies give evidence of its being studied and put to use. Master John's poem heads the line of later gardening manuals in verse over the centuries. Included among them were poems in Latin like Giuseppe Milio's De Hortorum Cura (Brescia 1574) and René Rapin's popular Hortorum Libri IV (Of Gdns, 1665). The latter was a four-canto work in Latin hexameters, dealing respectively with flowers, disposition of trees, water and orchards, and was followed by two English versions shortly afterwards, translated by John Evelyn the Younger in 1673 and James Gardiner in 1706. Where those versions were written in rhyming couplets, however, William Mason later chose Miltonic blank verse for his The English Garden: A Poem in Four Books (1772–81), an original work that took the Georgics as its model. His French contemporary Jacques Delille, having already translated the Latin Georgics, now