breath with Aeschylus and Euripides; and long after the Jacobean period the false tradition remained which, by putting these lifeless copies on the same footing as their great originals, perplexed and stultified literary criticism, much as the criticism of classical art was confused by an age which drew no distinction between late Graeco-Roman sculpture and the finest work of Praxiteles or Pheidias. By far the most brilliant poet of the Neronian age was Seneca's nephew, Marcus Annaeus Lucanus. His father, Annaeus Mela, the younger brother of the philosopher, is known chiefly through his more distinguished son; an interesting but puzzling notice in a life of Lucan speaks of him as famous at Rome "from his pursuit of the quiet life." This may imply refusal of some great office when his elder brother was practically ruler of the Empire; whatever stirrings of ambition he suppressed broke out with accumulated force in his son. Lucan's short life was one of feverish activity. At twenty-one he made his first public sensation by the recitation, in the theatre of Pompeius, of a panegyric on Nero, who had already murdered his own mother, but had not yet broken with the poet's uncle. Soon afterwards, he was advanced to the quaestorship, and a seat in the college of Augurs: but his brilliant poetical reputation seems to have excited the jealousy of the artist-emperor; a violent quarrel broke out between them, and Lucan, already in theory an ardent republican, became one of the principal movers in the conspiracy of Piso. The plan discussed among the conspirators of assassinating Nero while in the act of singing on the stage would, no doubt, commend itself specially to the young poet whom the Emperor had forbidden to recite in public. When the conspiracy was detected, Lucan's fortitude soon gave way; he betrayed one accomplice after another, one of the first names he surrendered being that of his mother, Acilia. The promise of pardon, under which his confessions were obtained, was not kept after they were completed; and the execution of Lucan, at the age of twenty-six, while it cut short a remarkable poetical career, rid the world of a very poor creature. Yet the final spasm of courage with which he died, declaiming a passage from his own epic, has gained him, in the noblest of English elegies, a place in the same verse with Sidney and Chatterton.