His general position here is easy enough to perceive, and there are of course defences for it. Among all our thousand fragments of Lucilius,[289] but two or three at most are long enough to give us any idea of his faculty of sustained composition. And fine as is the fragment to Albinus—with its Elizabethan reiteration of _virtus_ at the beginning of the lines, its straight-hitting sense, and the positive nobility of its ethic—numerous as are the instances in the smaller scraps of _Romana simplicitas_ and picturesque phrase, there is no doubt that the whole is rough and unfinished, not with the roughness of one who uses a rudimentary art, but of one who has not mastered—perhaps, as Horace insinuates, has not taken the trouble to master—one ready to his hand. But there is something of the Frenchman’s “_We_ are all princes or poets” about the tone of Horace himself. He is, _mutatis mutandis_, too much in the mood of a _parvenu_ who has just been admitted to an exclusive club, and thinks very meanly of poor wretches who are not entitled to use the club-paper. Footnote 289: _Poet. Lat. Min._ (Baehrens), vi. 139-266. Our greatest English Latinists recently have been singularly unkind to this poet. Munro made what I can only call a violent attack on him: and Mr Nettleship, while allowing him “extraordinary vigour” and “the ring of Caius Gracchus” (see his Essay on the Satires (second series), where Munro’s diatribe is quoted), practically indorses this. Against such judges I should not have a word to say on the linguistic side: but I claim full _parrhesia_ on the literary. The Virtue passage (which Munro specially refuses to except) is as rough as, say, Marston; but it has a far sincerer, loftier, and more truly poetical tone than anything of the kind in Horace, and than most things in Juvenal. And everywhere I see quality, passion, _phrase_. Here, at least, I can agree with Cicero (_De Orat._, ii. 6 and elsewhere), though _perurbanus_ is not exactly the epithet that I should, from his extant writings, myself select for Lucilius.