trious actions of the ancient Romans and the customs of his country':
and what is of importance to observe," adds Mr. Courthope, "is that, even
after the introduction of Greek culture, Cato's educational ideal was felt
to be the foundation of Roman greatness by the orators and poets who
adorned the golden age of Latin literature." The civic spirit was at once
the motive and vitalising force of Cicero's eloquence, and still acts as
its antiseptic. It breaks through the conventional forms of Virgil's
Eclogues and Georgics, and declares itself exultantly in such passages as
the famous eulogy--

"Sed neque Medorum silvae, ditissima terra,
Nec pulcher Ganges atque auro turbidus Hermus
Laudibus Italiae certent. . . ."

It closes the last Georgic on a high political note. Avowedly it inspires
the _AEneid_. It permeates all that Horace wrote. These two poets never
tire of calling on their countrymen to venerate the Roman virtues, to hold
fast by the old Sabine simplicity and:

"Pure religion breathing household laws."

Again, when the mischief was done, and Rome had accepted the Alexandrine
model of education and literary culture, Juvenal reinvoked the old spirit
in his denunciation of the hundred and more trivialities which the new
spirit engendered. It was a belated, despairing echo. You cannot expect
quite the same shout from a man who leads a forlorn sortie, and a man who
defends a proud citadel while yet it is merely threatened. But, allowing
for changed circumstances, you will find that Juvenal's is just the old
civic spirit turned to fierceness by despair. And he strikes out
unerringly enough at the ministers of Rome's decline--at the poets who
chatter and the rhetoricians who declaim on merely 'literary' topics; the
rich who fritter away life on private luxuries and the pursuit of trivial
aims; the debased Greek with his "smattering of encyclopaedic knowledge,"
but no devotion to the city in which he only hopes to make money.

Now is this civic spirit in literature (however humble its practitioners)
one which England can easily afford to despise? So far as I know, it has
been reserved for an age of newspapers to declare explicitly that such a
spirit is merely mischievous; that a poet ought to be a man of the study,
isolated amid the stir of passing events, serenely indifferent to his
country's fortunes, or at least withholding his gift (allowed, with
magnificent but unconscious irony, to