The punishment, as usual, has been adjusted to the crime; and the merit, as usual also, has met with its reward from the secure judgment of the world. The more a man knows Greek literature the more deeply will he be impressed with the inestimable services which, in criticism as elsewhere, the Greeks rendered to humanity. But the more he knows other literatures, besides Greek, the more will he be convinced of the necessity of enlarging, extending, and at the same time correcting, the Greek point of critical view. BOOK II LATIN CRITICISM ---------- “_At demonstrare virtutes, vel si quando ita incidat vitia, id ... maxime proprium est._”—QUINTILIAN. CHAPTER 1. BEFORE QUINTILIAN—CICERO, HORACE, SENECA THE ELDER, VARRO. THE CONDITIONS OF LATIN CRITICISM—CICERO—HIS ATTITUDE TO LUCRETIUS—HIS RHETORICAL WORKS—HIS CRITICAL VOCABULARY—HORACE—THE ‘AD PISONES’—ITS DESULTORINESS—AND ARBITRARY CONVENTIONALITY—ITS COMPENSATIONS—BRILLIANCY—TYPICAL SPIRIT—AND PRACTICAL VALUE—THE ‘SATIRES’ AND ‘EPISTLES’—"DECLAMATIONS"—THEIR SUBJECTS: EPIDEICTIC AND FORENSIC—THEIR INFLUENCE ON STYLE—SENECA THE ELDER—THE “SUASORIES”—THE ‘CONTROVERSIES’: THEIR INTRODUCTIONS—VARRO. [Sidenote: _The conditions of Latin criticism._] Those who direct their literary ideas by considerations of what they think likely to happen, or of what they think ought to have happened, would probably expect—neither without some reason nor without a certain amount of confirmation from experience—a considerable development of literary criticism under the Latin dispensation.[276] In the first place, the Romans had what the Greeks at first lacked, and afterwards too often disdained, that opportunity of Comparison, which, as has been said so often, is the very life and soul and breath of the higher and better critical exercise. In the second place, the whole literature of their classical period was itself a kind of critical imitation—sometimes pretty slavish, sometimes freer—of Greek: and it was practically impossible for a Roman to write without the exercise, independent or second-hand, of processes of study and thought which were critical or nothing. Against this must be set the facts—first, that the Latin literary genius was somewhat timid, that it felt itself rebuked by the majesty of Greece; and secondly, that the tendency of the race was not, till it was much mixed with others, very decidedly literary. Few Romans dared to approach the masterpieces of Greek literary art in a thoroughly critical spirit, and fewer had the sense of literature which might have enabled them to do so usefully. Further, their own period of consummate production was distinctly short, and not excessively fruitful, while those authors of their own to whom they devoted most attention stimulated only certain kinds of criticism.