wrote as items of trade that contributed to both local and national prosperity. For Roman citizens, farming was carried out in the service of the capital; for Britons the empire was consolidated as the result of mercantile enterprise and such commodities contributed to the general benefit. A critic has pointed out that "the British Library holds no fewer than twenty translations of the Georgics from [the 18th century] period; of these, eight are separately published translations of the Georgics alone. Several of these translations, such as Dryden's, were reprinted regularly throughout the century. Also noteworthy is the fact that the brisk rate of new translations continued into the early decades of the nineteenth century, with 1808 as a kind of annus mirabilis, when three new versions appeared." Some among these, like Dryden's and the Earl of Lauderdale's (1709), had primarily poetic aims. Other translators were clergymen amateurs (Thomas Nevile, Cambridge 1767) or, translating into prose, had school use in mind (Joseph Davidson, London 1743). William Sotheby went on to place his acclaimed literary version of 1800 in the context of others across Europe when he reissued it in the sumptuous folio edition Georgica Publii Virgilii Maronis Hexaglotta (London, 1827). There it was accompanied by versions in Italian by Gian-Francesco Soave (1765), in Spanish by Juan de Guzmán (1768), in French by Jacques Delille (1769), and in German by Johann Heinrich Voss (1789). Dutch influence on English farming also paved a way for the poem's rebirth, since Roman farming practices still prevailed in the Netherlands and were sustained there by Joost van den Vondel’s prose translation of the Georgics into Dutch (1646). English farmers too attempted to imitate what they thought were genuine Virgilian agricultural techniques. In 1724 the poet William Benson wrote, "There is more of Virgil’s husbandry in England at this instant than in Italy itself." Among those translators who aimed to establish Virgil's up-to-date farming credentials was James Hamilton, whose prose translation of Virgil's work was “published with such notes and reflexions as make him appear to have wrote like an excellent Farmer” (Edinburgh, 1742). This aspiration was supported by the assertion that, to make a proper translation, agricultural experience was a prerequisite—and for the lack of which, in the view of William Benson, Dryden's version was disqualified. That Robert Hoblyn had practical experience as a farmer was a qualification he considered the guarantee of his 1825 blank