went on to create in his The Sugar Cane (1764) a "West-India georgic", spreading the scope of this form into the Caribbean with the British colonial enterprise. Unlike most contemporary translations of Virgil, many of these practical manuals preferred Miltonic blank verse and the later examples stretched to four cantos, as in the Virgilian model. Later still there were poems with a broader scope, such as James Grahame's The British Georgics (Edinburgh, 1809). His work was on a different plan, however, proceeding month by month through the agricultural year and concentrating on conditions in Scotland, considering that "the British Isles differ in so many respects from the countries to which Virgil's Georgics alluded". Jacques Delille had already preceded him in France with a similar work, L'Homme des champs, ou les Géorgiques françaises (Strasbourg, 1800), a translation of which by John Maunde had been published in London the following year as The Rural Philosopher: or French Georgics, a didactic poem, and in the USA in 1804. Both works, however, though they bear the name of georgics, have more of a celebratory than a didactic function. They are a different sort of work that, while paying homage and alluding to Virgil's poem, have another end in view. This descriptive genre of writing had an equally Renaissance pedigree in Politian's poem Rusticus (1483), which he composed to be recited as an introduction to his lectures on the didactic poems of Hesiod and the Georgica. Its intention was to praise country living in the course of describing its seasonal occupations. A similar approach to the beauties of the countryside in all weathers was taken by James Thomson in the four sections of his The Seasons (1730). The poem has been described as "the supreme British achievement in the georgic genre, even though it has little to do with agriculture per se," and is more descriptive than didactic. Nevertheless, the Classical inspiration behind the work was so obvious that Thompson was pictured as writing it with "the page of Vergil literally open before him". Other works in this vein moved further from the Virgilian didactic mode. William Cowper’s discursive and subjective The Task (1785) has sometimes been included, as has Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy (1800). The latter proceeds through the farming year season by season and a partial translation into Latin was described by William Clubbe as being rendered 'in the manner of the