[279]. Ep. Ad Quint., Frat., ii. 11 (9 in some edd.)
[280]. It has been urged upon me that my judgment of Cicero’s verse is rather harsh, and that he at any rate made some progress towards the Lucretian hexameter before Lucretius. It may be so; tolerably careful and tolerably wide students of literature know that these things are always “in the air,” and that, sometimes if not always, you find them in the poetaster before you find them in the poet. But after reading all Cicero’s extant verse two or three times over, seeking diligently for mitigations of judgment, I am still afraid that “Cousin Cicero, you will never be a poet,” would have been, and justly, the verdict of Lucretius, had they stood to one another in the relations in which Swift and Dryden stood.
[281]. It is one of Ovid’s titles (v. infra) to credit as a critic that he did see the value of Lucretius, and expressed it in the well-known couplet (Amor., i. 15. 25)—
“Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti,
Exitio terras quum dabit una dies.”
Virgil’s still better known quit-rent for his borrowings (Georg., ii. 490) is a mere praise of the Lucretian free-thought, with no reference to poetry. But the praise (no mean one) of having appreciated Lucretius better than any other Roman is due to Statius (v. infra, pp. 268-270).
[282]. As You Like It, iii. 5. 82.
[283]. τραχύς, αὐστηρός, αὐθαδής, αὐχμηρός, εὐπινής, στρυφνός, συνεσπασμένος, ἀντίτυπος, ἀρχαϊκός, πυκνός, δεινός, &c. Mr Nettleship gives in all thirty-three, to which, I daresay, one could add as many more from the later rhetoricians, Longinus, and others down to Photius.
[284]. Etude sur la Langue de la Rhétorique et de la Critique Littéraire dans Cicéron. Par C. Causeret. Paris, 1886.
[285]. It has not seemed necessary to go through the literary passages of the Orations, though some, the Pro Archia especially, are not infertile in them. “What counsel says is not evidence,” whatever else it is.