text of this historian to remain incurably
corrupt. Taste and criticism have certainly incurred an irreparable loss
in that _Treatise on the Causes of the Corruption of Eloquence_, by
Quintilian; which he has himself noticed with so much satisfaction in
his "Institutes." Petrarch declares, that in his youth he had seen the
works of Varro, and the second Decad of Livy; but all his endeavours to
recover them were fruitless.

These are only some of the most known losses; but in reading
contemporary writers we are perpetually discovering many important ones.
We have lost two precious works in ancient biography: Varro wrote the
lives of seven hundred illustrious Romans; and Atticus, the friend of
Cicero, composed another, on the acts of the great men among the Romans.
When we consider that these writers lived familiarly with the finest
geniuses of their times, and were opulent, hospitable, and lovers of the
fine arts, their biography and their portraits, which are said to have
accompanied them, are felt as an irreparable loss to literature. I
suspect likewise we have had great losses of which we are not always
aware; for in that curious letter in which the younger Pliny describes
in so interesting a manner the sublime industry, for it seems sublime by
its magnitude, of his Uncle,[27] it appears that his Natural History,
that vast register of the wisdom and the credulity of the ancients, was
not his only great labour; for among his other works was a history in
twenty books, which has entirely perished. We discover also the works of
writers, which, by the accounts of them, appear to have equalled in
genius those which have descended to us. Pliny has feelingly described a
poet of whom he tells us, "his works are never out of my hands; and
whether I sit down to write anything myself, or to revise what I have
already wrote, or am in a disposition to amuse myself, I constantly take
up this agreeable author; and as often as I do so, he is still new."[28]
He had before compared this poet to Catullus; and in a critic of so fine
a taste as Pliny, to have cherished so constant an intercourse with the
writings of this author, indicates high powers. Instances of this kind
frequently occur. Who does not regret the loss of the Anticato of
Caesar?

The losses which the poetical world has sustained are sufficiently known
by those who are conversant with the few invaluable fragments of
Menander, who might have interested us perhaps more tha