After the partition of the Greek empire among the successors of Alexander, the city to which he had given name became the capital of the literary world; and arts and learning long continued to be protected even by the most degenerate of the Ptolemies. But the school which subsisted at Alexandria was of a very different taste and description from that which had flourished at Athens in the age of Pericles. In Egypt the Greeks became a more learned, and perhaps a more philosophical people, than they had been in the days of their ancient glory at home; but they were no longer a nation, and with their freedom their whole strength of feeling, and peculiar tone of mind, were lost. Servitude and royal munificence, with the consequent spirit of flattery which crept in, and even the enormous library of Alexandria, were injurious to the elastic and native spring of poetic fancy. The Egyptian court was crowded with men of erudition, instead of such men of genius as had thronged the theatre and _Agora_ of Athens. The courtly _literati_, the academicians, and the librarians of Alexandria, were distinguished as critics, grammarians, geographers, or geometricians. With them poetry became a matter of study, not of original genius or invention, and consequently never reached its highest flights. Though not without amenity and grace, they wanted that boldness, sublimity, and poetic enthusiasm by which the bards of the Greek republics were inspired. When, like Apollonius Rhodius, they attempted poetry of the highest class, they rose not above an elegant mediocrity; or when they attained perfection, as in the instance of Theocritus, it was in the inferior and more delicate branches of the art. Accordingly, these erudite and ornate poets chiefly selected as the subjects of their muse didactic topics of astronomy and physics, or obscure traditions derived from ancient fable. Lycophron immersed himself in such a sea of fabulous learning, that he became nearly unintelligible, and all of them were marked with the blemishes of affectation and obscurity, into which learned poets are most apt to fall. Among the pleiad of Alexandrian poets, none had so many of the faults and beauties of the school to which he belonged as Callimachus. He was conspicuous for his profound knowledge of the ancient traditions of Greece, for his poetic art and elegant versification, but he was also noted for deficiency of invention and original genius:— “Battiades semper toto cantabitur orbe, Quamvis ingenio non valet, arte valet(507).”