he poet himself, assailed the evils
of the age, the coterie-system, the endless Spanish war-service,
and the like; the very commencement of his Satires was a great
debate in the senate of the Olympian gods on the question, whether
Rome deserved to enjoy the continued protection of the celestials.
Corporations, classes, individuals, were everywhere severally
mentioned by name; the poetry of political polemics, shut out
from the Roman stage, was the true element and life-breath of
the Lucilian poems, which by the power of the most pungent wit
illustrated with the richest imagery--a power which still entrances
us even in the remains that survive--pierce and crush their
adversary "as by a drawn sword." In this--in the moral ascendency
and the proud sense of freedom of the poet of Suessa--lies the
reason why the refined Venusian, who in the Alexandrian age of
Roman poetry revived the Lucilian satire, in spite of all his
superiority in formal skill with true modesty yields to the earlier
poet as "his better." The language is that of a man of thorough
culture, Greek and Latin, who freely indulges his humour; a poet
like Lucilius, who is alleged to have made two hundred hexameters
before dinner and as many after it, is in far too great a hurry to
be nice; useless prolixity, slovenly repetition of the same turn,
culpable instances of carelessness frequently occur: the first
word, Latin or Greek, is always the best. The metres are similarly
treated, particularly the very predominant hexameter: if we transpose
the words--his clever imitator says--no man would observe that
he had anything else before him than simple prose; in point of
effect they can only be compared to our doggerel verses.(24)
The poems of Terence and those of Lucilius stand on the same level
of culture, and have the same relation to each other as a carefully
prepared and polished literary work has to a letter written on the
spur of the moment. But the incomparably higher intellectual gifts
and the freer view of life, which mark the knight of Suessa as
compared with the African slave, rendered his success as rapid
and brilliant as that of Terence had been laborious and doubtful;
Lucilius became immediately the favourite of the nation, and he
like Beranger could say of his poems that "they alone of all were
read by the people." The uncommon popularity of the Lucilian poem
is, in a historical point of view, a remarkable event; we see from
it that literature was a