is said to be translated from a dirge chaunted at Athenian funerals; and the passage where he represents the feigned tortures of hell as but the workings of a guilty and unquiet spirit, is versified from an oration of Æschines against Timarchus. In the first and second books, Lucretius chiefly expounds the cosmogony, or physical part of his system—a system which had been originally founded by Leucippus, a philosopher of the Eleatic sect, and, from his time, had been successively improved by Democritus and Epicurus. He establishes in these books his two great principles,—that nothing can be made from nothing, and that nothing can ever be annihilated or return to nothing; and, that there is in the universe a void or space, in which atoms interact. These atoms he believes to be the original component parts of all matter, as well as of animal life; and the arrangement of such corpuscles occasions, according to him, the whole difference in substances. It cannot be denied, that in these two books particularly, (but the observation is in some degree applicable to the whole poem,) there are many barren tracts—many physiological, meteorological, and geological details—which are at once too incorrect for the philosophical, and too dry and abstract for the poetical reader. It is wonderful, however, how Lucretius contrives, by the beauty of his images, to give a picturesque colouring and illustration to the most unpromising topics. Near the beginning of his poem, for example, in attempting to prove a very abstract proposition, he says,— “Præterea, quur vere rosam, frumenta calore, Viteis auctumno fondi suadente videmus.” Thus, by the introduction of the rose and vines, bestowing a fragrance and freshness, and covering, as it were, with verdure, the thorns and briars of abstract discussion. In like manner, when contending that nothing utterly perishes, but merely assumes another form, what a lovely rural landscape does he present to the imagination! —— “Pereunt imbres, ubi eos pater Æther In gremium matris Terräi præcipitavit: At nitidæ surgunt fruges, ramique virescunt Arboribus; crescunt ipsæ, fœtuque gravantur. Hinc alitur porro nostrum genus atque ferarum; Hinc lætas urbeis puerûm florere videmus, Frondiferasque novis avibus canere undique sylvas; Hinc, fessæ pecudes, pingues per pabula læta, Corpora deponunt, et candens lacteus humor Uberibus manat distentis; hinc nova proles Artubus infirmis teneras lasciva per herbas Ludit, lacte mero menteis percussa novellas.”