_Ad Att._, ii. 1: _Meus autem liber totum Isocratis_ μυροθήκιον, _atque omnes ejus discipulorum arculas, ac nonnihil etiam Aristotelia pigmenta consumpsit_. But the most direct and famous piece of pure literary criticism in the letters is an unlucky one. Cicero of course came [Sidenote: _His attitude to Lucretius._] before—or rather himself led—the most brilliant age of Latin, and could not have so much as seen the work of Virgil, of Horace, much less of Ovid, and others. But he could and he did know Lucretius, whose work an absurd tradition has it that he even revised. And what does he say of this mighty poet, who unites the poignancy of Catullus to the sustained grasp of Virgil, and adds a sublimity unknown to both? The manuscripts are said to read: _Lucretii poemata, ut scribis, ita sunt: multis luminibus ingenii multæ tamen artis_.[279] The earlier editors most naturally considered this sentence nonsense. No doubt the opposition of _ingenium_ and _ars_ is a common thing, almost a commonplace, in Latin. But would any one, unless he had a thesis to prove, dream of regarding _tamen_ as admissible here? of translating it as if it were _necnon_? There is, of course, a certain paradoxical sense in which, at the end of the nineteenth century, a brisk young critic might say of Mr X., “He has plenty of brains, _and yet_ he really knows how to write.” But this is not in the least Roman; and it is Ciceronian rather less than it is Roman generally. Some, recognising that there must have been a _non_ somewhere, put it before _multæ_, and suppose that Cicero, as if he had been accustomed to Virgilian smoothness, thought Lucretius rough. But this, from his own verses, is very unlikely. The natural emendation is to put the _non_ (as till recently it used always to be supplied) before _multis_, which emendation, and which alone, makes the sentence run as, without prejudice on the score of the special meaning, we should expect it to run: “The poems of Lucretius are, as you say, not very full of brilliancy in genius, but show plenty of art.” Footnote 279: _Ep. Ad Quint._, _Frat._, ii. 11 (9 in some edd.)