penetrated with the spirit of a creed. In both cases his poetical affinity was with the poets of an earlier day, and his poetical manner something absolutely peculiar to himself. Both of them under this strangely mixed impulse set themselves to embody their creed in a great work of art. But the art did not appeal strongly to sectaries, nor the creed to artists. The _De Rerum Natura_ and the _Paradise Lost_, while they exercised a profound influence over later poets, came silently into the world, and seem to have passed over the heads of their immediate contemporaries. There is yet another point of curious resemblance between them. Every student of Milton knows that the only English poet from whom he systematically borrowed matter and phrase was a second-rate translator of a second-rate original, who now would be almost forgotten but for the use Milton made of him. For one imitation of Spenser or Shakespeare in the _Paradise Lost_ it would be easy to adduce ten--not mere coincidences of matter, but direct transferences--of Sylvester's Du Bartas. While Lucretius was a boy, Cicero published the version in Latin hexameters of the _Phaenomena_ and _Prognostica_ of Aratus to which reference has already been made. These poems consist of only between eleven and twelve hundred lines in all, but had, in the later Alexandrian period, a reputation (like that of the _Sepmaine_ of Du Bartas) far in excess of their real merit, and were among the most powerful influences in founding the new style. The many imitations in Lucretius of the extant fragments of these Ciceronian versions show that he must have studied their vocabulary and versification with minute care. The increased technical possibilities shown by them to exist in the Latin hexameter--for in them, as in nearly all his permanent work, Cicero was mastering the problem of making his own language an adequate vehicle of sustained expression--may even have been the determining influence that made Lucretius adopt this poetical form. Till then it may have been just possible that native metrical forms might still reassert themselves. Inscriptions of the last century of the Republic show that the saturnian still lingered in use side by side with the rude popular hexameters which were gradually displacing it; and the _Punic War_ of Naevius was still a classic. Lucretius' choice of the hexameter, and his definite conquest of it as a medium of the richest and most varied expression, placed the matter beyond recall. The technical imperfections which remained in it were now reduced within a visible compass; its power to convey sustained argument, to express the most delicate shades of meaning, to adjust itself to the greatest heights and the subtlest tones of emotion, was already acquired when Lucretius handed it on to Virgil. And here, too, as well as in the wide field of literature with which his fame is more intimately connected, from the actual impulse given by his own early work and