feeling more artistically
elaborated. It would be difficult to parallel such Lucretian
passages in Greek poetry. The Greeks lacked an undefinable something
of rusticity which dignified the Latin race. This quality was not
altogether different from what we call homeliness. Looking at the
busts of Romans, and noticing their resemblance to English country
gentlemen, I have sometimes wondered whether the Latin genius, just
in those points where it differed from the Greek, was not
approximated to the English.

[1] The elaborate illustration of the first four lines of
this passage, painted by Botticelli (in the Florence
Academy of Fine Arts), proves Botticelli's incapacity or
unwillingness to deal with the subject in the spirit of
the original. It is graceful and 'subtle' enough, but not
Lucretian.

All subjects needing a large style, brief and rapid, but at the same
time luminous with imagination, were sure of the right treatment
from Lucretius. This is shown by his enumeration of the celestial
signs (v. 1188):--

in caeloque deum sedes et templa locarunt,
per caelum volvi quia nox et luna videtur,
luna dies et nox et noctis signa severa
noctivagaeque faces caeli flammaeque volantes,
nubila sol imbres nix venti fulmina grando
et rapidi fremitus et murmura magna minarum.

Again, he never failed to rise to an occasion which required the
display of fervid eloquence. The Roman eloquence, which in its
energetic volubility was the chief force of Juvenal, added a tidal
strength and stress of storm to the quick gathering thoughts of the
greater poet. The exordia to the first and second books, the
analysis of Love in the fourth, the praises of Epicurus in the third
and fifth, the praises of Empedocles and Ennius in the first, the
elaborate passage on the progress of civilisation in the fifth, and
the description of the plague at Athens which closes the sixth, are
noble instances of the sublimest poetry sustained and hurried onward
by the volume of impassioned improvisation. It is difficult to
imagine that Lucretius wrote slowly. The strange word _vociferari_,
which he uses so often, and which the Romans of the Augustan age
almost dropped from their poetic vocabulary, seems exactly made to
suit his utterance. Yet at times he tempers the full torrent of
resonant utterance with divine tranquillity, and leaves upon our
mind that sense of powerful aloofness from his subject, which only
belongs