which, as some sixteen rather bombastic hexameters full of gradus-tags inform us, quite alarms the gods, major and minor. In the midst of it there steps forth “a stately woman of lofty stature, and confidence greater than common, but radiantly handsome, helmed and crowned, weaponed both for defence and with flashing arms wherewith she could smite her enemies with a thundering coruscation. Under her armpits, and thrown over her shoulder in Latian fashion, was a vest, exhibiting embroidery of all possible figures in varied hue, while her breast was baldricked with gems of the most exquisite colour. As she walked her arms clashed, so that you would have thought the broken levin to rattle—with explosive handclaps, like the collision of clouds, so that you might even believe her capable of wielding the thunderbolts of Jove. For she it is who, like a mighty queen of all things, can direct them whither she will and call them back whence she chooses, and unbend men to tears or incite them to rage, and sway the minds of civic crowds as of warring armies. She brought beneath her sway the senate, the rostra, the courts at Rome,” &c., &c., the innocent and transparent allegory of the earlier part changing into a half-historical, half-philosophical account of the functions of Rhetoric generally. She is followed by a great crowd of men, some Greek, some Roman, among whom (it is worth mentioning, as a proof of the taste of the age) Æschines, Isocrates, and Lysias are specially mentioned for the one tongue, and, with some uncertain names, Pliny and Fronto in the other. Cicero is later put, by Rhetoric herself, as beyond competition in either. She displays her declamatory skill in a formal exordium, and then plunges into the usual matter of Rhetorical treatises. The treatment is technical, but by no means ill-arranged, clear enough even in the bewildering labyrinths of the status, not excessive in the Figures, and altogether one of the best of the Latin Rhetorics. When she finishes, Mercury beckons to her to join the group of those who had played their part, and to salute the bride. So she walks with much confidence up to Philology, gives her “a sounding kiss—for she can do nothing silently even if she would—on the top of her head,”[[447]] and joins the society of her sisters.
Recurring to the speech of one of these sisters, Grammar, and combining it with this, we shall have no ill notion of the helps to literary criticism with which the next thousand years of the world’s history were provided in the west of Europe. They were rudimentary enough, and those who were furnished with them had in most cases no thought—indeed for long centuries hardly any opportunity—of using them for any critical purpose. But they lay ready for the hand of others, and at the Renaissance, as well as in one brilliant and some minor instances earlier, they were turned with only a little delay to their proper purpose.
Grammar, with the quaintness that suffuses the whole book, says, “My parts are four—litteræ, litteratura, litteratus, litterate. ‘Letters’ are what I teach; ‘Literature’ am I who teach them; ‘the man of letters’ is he whom I shall have taught; ‘literate’ the manner in which my pupil shall skilfully handle things.” But the expectation thus raised is a little falsified, for “letters” are taken at their own foot, though Pallas pulls up Grammar and maintains that she has omitted the “historic part,” which does not mean our historic in the very least, any more than litteratura means our Literature.
There is, however, both in these places and throughout the book, a great deal of “fine confused feeding,” both on matters really literary and on those more or less subsidiary to literature, from Phonetics upwards. The citations, though not extremely frequent or copious, show pretty wide reading, especially in Latin. In the book on Rhetoric we find very particular and minute attention paid to these considerations of euphony to which attention has already been drawn, Martianus (who, whether we allow him poetry or not, was evidently a very careful and deft versifier[[448]]) applying his practice in the other harmony with his usual quaint conceit here. Nowhere, perhaps, do we better perceive, though nowhere may we find it more difficult exactly to follow, the niceties of the ancient ear, than in the caution that while it is well to end a clause with a molossus (three longs), if the final word is a trisyllable you must be careful to put a trochee before it, and by no means a spondee or pyrrhic. Thus “Littus ejectis,” with which Tully finishes a clause, is all right, but “rupes ejectis” would be pessima clausula, and “apex ejectis” (where apex is described as a pyrrhic, according to its natural quantity in the oblique cases) almost worse.
Further than this, however, Low Latin was not encouraged by its tutor Martianus to advance. Nor is it surprising that with such teaching we find no such advance in the first lisping of the modern literatures themselves, till the strangely articulate speech of their greatest critic, as he was their greatest creator—Dante the Wingbearer.
[421]. Ed. Hertz, 2 vols., Leipsic, 1886.
[422]. Cf. the amusing chapter (vi. 17) in which he tells with innocent pride how he overwhelmed quempiam græculum with apt citations on the word obnoxius. Gellius is not the only critic who has allowed parallel passages to choke his critical faculties, or has endeavoured to make up by the former for the absence of the latter.
[423]. This Antonius Julianus, from another notice (xx. 9), seems to have been a person of slightly florid but by no means bad taste. For Gellius tells us that he used to say his ears were delighted and caressed by the coined words in the first mimiambic of C. Matius,[[a]] such as Columbulatim, which is certainly not a little charming and very Caroline. After all, the famous advice to regard and avoid an unusual word, tanquam scopulum (which, by the way, Gellius gives us), is fatal to poetry.
[a]. The fragments of this author may be found either in the sixth volume of Baehrens’s Poetæ Latini Minores, or in the appendix to Otto Crusius’s edition of Herondas (Leipsic, 1898). He has another word which Herrick might have Englished, albicascit.