The first translation which appeared in this country, and which is entitled “Terence in Englysh,” is without date, but is supposed to have been printed in 1520. It was followed by Bernard’s translation, 1598—Hoole’s, 1670—Echard’s, 1694—and Dr Patrick’s, 1745. All those prose versions are flat and obsolete, and in many places unfaithful to their original. At length Colman published a translation in familiar blank verse, in which he has succeeded extremely well. He has seldom mistaken the sense of his author, and has frequently attained to his polished ease of style and manner. The notes, which have been judiciously selected from former commentators, with some observations of his own, form a valuable part of the work.
LUCILIUS.
F. Douza was the first who collected the fragments of this satiric poet, and formed them into a cento. Having shewn his MS. and notes to Joseph Scaliger, he was encouraged to print them, and an edition accordingly came forth at Leyden, in 1597. It soon, however, became very scarce. A single copy of it was accidentally discovered by Vulpius, in one of the principal public libraries of Italy; but, owing to the place which it had occupied, it had been so destroyed by constant eaves-dropping from the roof of the house, that when he laid his hands on it, it was scarcely legible. Having restored, however, and amended the text as far as possible, he reprinted it at Padua in 1735.
LUCRETIUS.
The work of Lucretius, like the Æneid of Virgil, had not received the finishing hand of its author, at the period of his death. The tradition that Cicero revised it, and gave it to the public, does not rest on any authority more ancient than that of Eusebius; and, had the story been true, it would probably have been mentioned in some part of Cicero’s voluminous writings, or those of the early critics. Eichstädt[607], while he denies the revisal by Cicero, is of opinion that it had been corrected by some critic or grammarian; and that thus two MSS., differing in many respects from each other, had descended to posterity—the one as it came from the hand of the poet, and the other as amended by the reviser. This he attempts to prove from the great inequality of the language—now obsolete and rugged—now polished and refined—which difference can only, he thinks, be accounted for, from the original and corrected copies having been mixed together in some of those middle-age transcriptions, on which the first printed editions were formed. The old grammarians, too, he alleges, frequently quote verses of Lucretius, which no longer compose parts of his poem, and which therefore must have been altogether omitted by the corrector; and, finally, the readings in the different MSS. are so widely different, that it is incredible that the variations could have proceeded from the transcribers or interpolators, and could have been occasioned only by the author or reviser of the poem.
But though not completely polished by the author, there is no ground for the conjecture, that the poem ever consisted of more than the present six books—an opinion which seems to have originated in an orthographical error, and which is contradictory to the very words of the poet himself.[608]
The work of Lucretius does not appear to have been popular at Rome, and the MSS. of it were probably not very numerous in the latter ages of the empire. It is quoted by Raban Maur, Abbot of Fulda, in his book De Universo[609], which was written in the ninth century. The copies of it, however, seem to have totally disappeared, previous to the revival of literature; but at length Poggio Bracciolini, while attending the Council of Constance, whither he repaired in 1414, discovered a MS. in the monastery of St Gal, about twenty miles from that city[610]. It is from the following lines, in a Latin elegy, by Cristoforo Landini, on the death of this celebrated ornament of his age, that we learn to whom we are indebted for the first of philosophic poems. Landini, recording the discoveries of his friend, exclaims—
“Illius manu, nobis, doctissime rhetor,