sented by the Baron, again described in the character of Ariel, it being a common way with authors, in this fabulous manner, to take such a liberty. As for instance, I have read in St Evremont, that all the different characters in Petronius are but Nero in so many different appearances. And in the key to the curious romance of Barclay's Argenis, both Poliarchus and Archombrotus mean only the king of Navarre." (Pope's Works, Vol. v. p. 364, Ed. Roscoe).

Now let us take any real allegory-" The tale of a Tub" for instance-how careful the author is to make its application as clear and the details as consistent as possible! No incongruous and inapplicable circumstances are thrown in to "heighten the effect" by perplexing the reader. And if all allegories must be unambiguous in order to produce their effect upon the mind of the reader, and obtain popularity in the closet, much more clear must they be made to the spectator, if they are to succeed on the stage. It is only in the very simplest form, as for instance in the old Moralities, where all is explained and nothing left to be inferred, that Allegory has ever been presented under the guise of Drama. Prof. Süvern may ransack the dramatic history of every people, ancient and modern, without finding a parallel to the plot of the "Birds," as conceived by him. Some idea of its absurdity may be formed by supposing an extravaganza to be produced next Easter at Drury Lane, of which the principal character should be a combination of Mr Disraeli and M. Kossuth, and the second a personification of Young England with the attributes of Ledru Rollin. WILL. GEO. CLARK.

Fronto and Tacitus.

Niebuhr on Fronto, Walther, Ritter, and Orelli on Tacitus, have omitted to compare Tac. H. IV. 6: (Etiam sapientibus cupido gloriæ novissima exuitur) with Fronto, ad M. Cæs. de eloquent. 1 §7 (p. 78 Nieb.): Novissimum namque homini sapientiam colenti amiculum est gloriæ cupido: id novissimum exuitur. Still greater is the resemblance between this passage of Fronto and those of Athen. and Simplic. cited by Orelli (after Lipsius and Boxhorn.) Milton has followed Tacitus. Lycidas 71: Fame... That last infirmity of noble minds. T. E. B. MAYOR.

21

II.

On Lucretius.

Ir would hardly perhaps do violence to the taste of the present age to call Lucretius the greatest of extant Latin poets. Like the rest of his countrymen, he is not a great creative genius; we find in him many echoes even of the scanty fragments which we yet possess of the old tragic and epic poets Attius, Pacuvius and, above all, Ennius. He owes still more to 'the Greeks, especially Empedocles, so far as regards the form of his poem. Many instances have been pointed out in which Lucretius has translated or imitated this philosopher; and doubtless these would be found to be many times more numerous, if the entire works of Empedocles had survived. For among the few new fragments contained in the recently published treatise of Hippolytus there is one (p. 254 ed. Ox.) which has clearly served as the model to a passage in Lucretius. Though it is corrupt, we see from it that Empedocles invokes the muse aurą συναγωνίζεσθαι, and uses these words, ἄμβροτε μοῦσα, . . . νῦν αὖτε παρίστασο, Καλλιόπεια, Αμφὶ θεῶν μακάρων ἀγαθὸν λόγον ἐμφαίνοντι. This passage must have occurred in the latter part of his poem on Nature, where he treated of the gods; and Lucretius in a corresponding portion of his work (vI. 92), before discoursing of heavenly objects, employs a similar metaphor and form of address: Tu mihi supremæ præscripta ad candida calcis Currenti spatium præmonstra, callida musa, Calliope, &c. From the splendid eulogies, which in his first book he passes on Ennius and Empedocles, we may feel sure that he did not wish to conceal his obligations, but, like other Latin poets, thought he had a right to make what use he pleased of his Greek and Roman predecessors. And he has merits of his own unsurpassed in the whole compass of Latin poetry. It has often struck me that his genius is akin to that of Milton. He displays a wonderful depth and fervour of thought, expressed in language of singular force and beauty; an admirable faculty of clear and vigorous and well-sustained philosophical reasoning; and a style equal in its purity and correctness to that of Terence, Cæsar or Cicero, and superior to that of any writer of the Augustan age. Al

though various causes prevented him from receiving from the Romans the amount of praise and acknowledgment to which he was fairly entitled, yet the most famous of their poets must have carefully studied and deeply admired him. His contemporary Catullus gives frequent proofs of imitation; Horace shews in his Odes, as well as in his Satires and Epistles, that he had attentively perused him; Ovid in his Metamorphoses and elsewhere has paraphrased whole passages of his poem; and Virgil has gleaned from it with unwearied diligence the most striking expressions and turns of thought. He was not known to Dante and Petrarch, but Tasso has imitated parts of his poem. Molière appears to have commenced his literary career by translating him; and a fragment of this translation is imbedded in the Misanthrope (Act II. Sc. 5). Voltaire's admiration was great, but perhaps not disinterested. Among our own countrymen, Spenser has given in the fourth book of the Faery Queen an exquisite paraphrase of the address to Venus; Dryden has translated this and other passages; Milton, and I believe Shakespeare, not unfrequently borrow from him thoughts and phrases. In our own days he has obtained high praise from Coleridge and Wordsworth; and Goethe tells us in a letter to Knebel that he had once had the intention of writing a special treatise on the relation of Lucretius to the times in which he lived.

But, notwithstanding all this, fate or accident has dealt hardly with him. It is a curious fact that, while the Greek writers almost without exception were long-lived, hardly a single Latin poet passed the period of middle life; and the two greatest poems of Rome were both left unfinished at the death of their authors. Lucretius was evidently of a morbid temper of mind; Goethe wished to shew that circumstances made him necessarily an Epicurean; but to me his disposition would appear to have been better suited to the doctrines of Zeno. Yet he is perhaps one among many other proofs how nearly allied the two systems were in reality, while, in appearance, exactly opposed to one another: contraries are always contained under the same genus. He seems to have found the times out of joint, and to have sought consolation in the cold apathy of epicureanism. With fiery eloquence he preached the doctrine that tranquillity and repose were all sufficient for happiness; "but thereof came in the end

despondency and madness." He perished by his own hand during a fit of frenzy, in the 44th year of his age, leaving the last five books of his poem incomplete; and it appears to have been unskilfully prepared for publication after his death. This was not however his only mishap. The Augustan poets attained so exclusive a popularity, that the greater part of the older poetical literature fell soon into comparative neglect. The Romans, moreover, as Quintilian informs us, found Lucretius difficult to understand. And thus it came to pass that only a single mutilated manuscript survived the wreck of ancient literature; and many of his verses have been lost to us beyond recovery. After the revival of learning a succession of editors attempted to restore his text, often at the expense of the author's meaning. Even the greatest of them, Lambinus, unsurpassed as a Latin scholar, but a sorry philosopher, has too often given us a mere κάλλος κακῶν ὕπουλον, serviug only to obscure the meaning by concealing from us our ignorance. At length Wakefield, professing to restore the text by a collation of several manuscripts and old editions, rendered "confusion worse confounded" by a total misapprehension of the true state of the case, introducing as the genuine words of the poet the merest blunders of copyists, and adding to this a rashness and unconscientiousness almost without example. I have this moment before me a collation of our Cambridge manuscript, and I find that Wakefield is as frequently wrong as right in the readings which he cites from it. Thus he filled with the grossest barbarisms a writer whose latinity is as pure as that of Cæsar or Terence; and explained these in defiance alike of sense and grammar. Madvig was the first to give a hint of the right method of proceeding. This was done much more completely by Jac. Bernays of Bonn in a dissertation based on a collation of the two Leyden manuscripts and published in the Rhenish Museum for 1847. To this essay Lachmann has hardly done justice: I do not mean to say that he could not have done all that he did without it, but it certainly anticipates him in several of his discoveries. But these dawnings of the truth were soon lost in the blaze of Lachmann's edition, which placed the criticism of Lucretius once and for ever on a sure basis. It is not my intention to dilate here on what he has done; this can be best seen by referring to the work itself. We learn from his biographer that he spent upon

As a

it the last five years of his busy life, reading expressly for its illustration a large portion of Latin literature; and it is unquestionably his masterpiece. This edition has been followed by one without notes by Bernays, published in 1852. With great modesty he has bowed to the authority of his predecessor; and it seems to me that he has been often led into error by too great a deference to him: not but that he corrects him in many places, and in others deserts him, I think, without reason. critic of the language, Lachmann is supreme; as an interpreter of the philosophy, he appears to me to be less successful, and in not a few passages to have done violence to his author's meaning. Every one who reads this paper will possess Lachmann's, and ought to possess Bernays' edition; I shall therefore content myself with attempting to throw new light on that which I conceive to have been misunderstood by them and previous editors, and by offering emendations of some corrupt passages, Lucretius affording of course a wide scope for this, as his text is derived from a single uncertain source.

Wherever Lachmann examines for himself, his accuracy may be depended upon; where he has trusted to others, he has sometimes been misled. During a residence at Florence in the summer of 1851 I inspected the eight MSS. of Lucretius belonging to the Laurentian library. On comparing the one in Plut. xxxv. 31 with ten MSS. of the same library, written in a beautiful hand and subscribed with the name of Antonius Marii Filius, neither the learned Head-Librarian nor myself could detect the very smallest point of resemblance between the writing of the latter and the MS. of Lucretius. Lachmann again attributes numberless emendations to this Antonius M. F. which are found also in the manuscript Plut. xxxv. 30, attributed to the wellknown Nicolaus Nicoli. On the other hand, corrections made in xxxv. 31 are often assigned to Marullus, Lambinus, and others; and Lambinus receives credit for the reading finem facis (III. 943) which appears in Avancius. Thus Lachmann, as often happens, from a too great anxiety to give every one his due has overshot the mark. MS. Plut. xxxv. 32 is only noticeable on account of some marginal notes which do not extend much beyond the thousandth verse of the first book, but which display great knowledge and acuteness for the time at which they must have been written. They appear to be principally founded on