"Yet again, were the Nature of things suddenly to utter a voice, and thus with her own lips upbraid one of us, 'What ails thee so, O mortal, to let thyself loose in too feeble grievings? why weep and wail at death? for if thy past life and overspent has been sweet to thee, and all the good thereof has not, as if poured into a pierced vessel, run through and joylessly perished, why dost thou not retire like a banqueter filled with life, and calmly, O fool, take thy peaceful sleep? But if all thou hast had is perished and spilt, and thy life is hateful, why seekest thou yet to add more which shall once again all perish and fall joylessly away? why not rather make an end of life and labour? for there is nothing more that I can contrive and invent for thy delight; all things are the same for ever. Even were thy body not yet withered, nor thy limbs weary and worn, yet all things remain the same, didst thou go on to live all the generations down, nay, even more, wert thou never doomed to die'--what do we answer?" It is in passages of which the two hundred lines beginning thus are the noblest instance, passages of profound and majestic broodings over life and death, that the long rolling weight of the Lucretian hexameter tells with its full force. For the golden cadence of poesy we have to wait till Virgil; but the strain that Lucretius breathes through bronze is statelier and more sonorous than any other in the stately and sonorous Roman speech. Like Naevius a century and a half before, he might have left the proud and pathetic saying on his tomb that, after he was dead, men forgot to speak Latin in Rome. He stands side by side with Julius Caesar in the perfect purity of his language. The writing of the next age, whether prose or verse, gathered richness and beauty from alien sources; if the poem of Lucretius had no other merit, it would be a priceless document as a model of the purest Latin idiom in the precise age of its perfection. It follows from this that in certain points of technique Lucretius kept behind his age, or rather, deliberately held aloof from the movement of his age towards a more intricate and elaborate art. The wave of Alexandrianism only touched him distantly; he takes up the Ennian tradition where Ennius had left it, and puts into it the immensely increased faculty of trained expression which a century of continuous literary practice, and his own admirably clear and quick intelligence, enable him to supply. The only Greek poets mentioned by him are Homer and Empedocles. His remoteness from the main current of contemporary literature is curiously parallel to that of Milton. The Epicurean philosophy was at this time, as it never was either earlier or later, the predominant creed among the ruling class at Rome: but except in so far as its shallower aspects gave the motive for light verse, it was as remote from poetry as the Puritan theology of the seventeenth century. In both cases a single poet of immense genius was also deeply