Supposing this to be so, some have tried to make out that Cicero’s well-known dislike of the Epicurean tenets accounts for the unfavourable criticism. So much the worse for him as a literary critic if it was so. A man who cannot taste Shelley because Shelley attacks Christianity, or laugh at the _Twopenny Postbag_ because Moore was a Whig, may be, and very likely is, an honour to his species as a man, but the less said about him as a critic of literature the better. But there is no real probability of such a plea having any foundation. We shall see what Quintilian says about Lucretius later: we know that very few other Latin writers say anything about him at all. Cicero, who would fain have been a poet, and who sometimes could hammer out a tolerable hexameter,[280] could not as a mere craftsman, as a mere student of Rhetoric, fail to appreciate something of the “art” of Lucretius. The stately volume of those magnificent hexameters—the _ne plus ultra_ of their kind in more ways than one or two—could not but appeal to him as a mere connoisseur of Latin rhythm, which (put him high or low in general literature) he most certainly was. The difference in comparison with Ennius, as a matter of art, was for such a man as Cicero simply unmistakable. Footnote 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.