But the qualities of the Lucretian “genius,” as distinguished from the Lucretian art, were not suited to attract Cicero—were, we may say, without fear of injustice, suited to attract very few Romans of the true type.[281] That type was, as far as the defects went, distinctly “barbarian,” in the sense in which Mr Matthew Arnold (very unjustly) applied the word to the English aristocracy—full of vigour, instinct with the faculty of ruling, magnanimous after a fashion, but impenetrable to ideas, only formally religious, shutting off its keen perception of a certain justice with huge blinkers, and, above all, curiously insensible to the vague, the mystical, the sense of wonder. Now, Lucretius, though he had chosen for himself a creed approaching mere materialism, had treated it in a fashion constantly and unabashedly ideal. It does not need the “flaming bastions of the world” or the sense of the _néant_, splendidly as he can describe both, to awake the poetical faculty in him. He can make poetry out of the _exiguum clinamen_, and out of things less promising if even more abstract still. With him it is always “the riding that does it”; the subject hardly matters at all. Lucretius, in short, was one of the great poets—sheerly and merely as poets—of the world. The didactics in which our eighteenth-century versemen so dismally failed offer no more difficulties to him than a love-poem or a flowery description. He will do you a science, or an atomic system, as another might do an Odyssey or a story of Lancelot. Now this was what the ancients, with all their acuteness and originality, could seldom understand or like; and what Cicero (a man of genius in some ways, but something of a Philistine and nothing of a poet) could like least of all those who can in any way be compared with him. Many of the beauties of the Lucretian imagination would be no doubt simply lost on him; and others he would consider wasted on the wrong subjects, if not positively applied in the wrong manner. Let us, however, for fairness' sake, accept the MS. reading, allow that _tamen_ may be the same or nearly the same as _necnon_, and further allow that as Marcus is only echoing words of Quintus which we do not possess, equity would in any case require that we should lay no very great stress on his own. There will still remain the objection that a poem of this character and importance, brought directly under his notice, and already as is clear within his knowledge, does not tempt him to do anything more than echo his correspondent’s words in a cut-and-dried formula which would be applicable to any tolerably good composition in verse, and which does not touch nor approach the idiosyncrasy of the poem itself. We cannot therefore very greatly regret that we have so little pure literary criticism from him. But still we must, for the sake of completeness, give some account of his Rhetorical works, which, in a manner, play the same complementary part to the _Ars