His power of observation may well have been inherited, and we can hardly doubt that it was encouraged by the parents who made a push to give him a gentleman's education. It was not driven out of him by the training in bad rhetoric which poisoned for him the last days of his school life. He saw natural objects with a clearness which in later days sometimes deserted him when he came to describe the scenes and incidents of an epic poem. We do well to call the Aeneid his greatest work, but its greatness is other than that of the Georgics.