To the first half of the reign of Augustus, belong the brilliant days of Virgil and Horace, and of many other contemporaries of less eminence. In Horace poetry is still lyric; but afterwards it loses this character. It adapts itself more and more to the Greek; the old licences of metre are altogether set aside, and the Greek being law in everything, it is a mere translating of the Greek: it is Grecian poetry in Latin words. The language—except in particular cases, for the sake of embellishment,—carefully eschews every obsolete phrase, and the written phraseology is in perfect harmony with the spoken one. Though Virgil says _olli_, _aulai_, he never does so in the Bucolics and Georgics, but in the Æneid; and that from the same grammatical reasons which the Alexandrian writers had for their rules for the Greek epic style. Virgil was born on the fifteenth of October 682, and he died in 733, on the twenty-second of September; Horace was born on the eighth of December 687, and he died the twenty-seventh of November 744. We cannot allow of the adoration with which the later Romans regarded Virgil: he is wanting in that fertility and richness of invention which his theme required. His Eclogues are far from being a happy imitation of Theocritus, as they try to produce something on the Roman soil which could not be there. Theocritus’ shepherds have sprung from true Siculian, and not from Greek materials; they bear the stamp of genuine nationality: Daphnis is a Sicilian hero. But when Virgil wishes to transfer them to the sky of Lombardy, he places Greek names and Greek peculiarities in a spot where they could not exist at all. More happy is his didactic poem on husbandry: he keeps himself in a middle sphere, and one cannot speak otherwise than in its praise. The whole of the Æneid, from the beginning to the end, is a misconceived idea: but this does not prevent its being full of beauties in its details; and it also displays a learning from which the historian can never glean too much. No epic poem can be successful, unless it be a lively, hearty narrative of some achievement of which the whole story has become a kind of national heir-loom. It is a silly remark of a still living historian, that an epic poem would never tell with the people, unless the subject were sufficiently old: if the events are such as every one knows, and as can be made to receive a certain impress of originality without losing their own distinguishing character, then they are fit for epic poetry, and for the arts in general. This is the reason why subjects from Sacred History are so well adapted for the historical painter: it is because the beholder understands at once what the artist wants to represent, and is able to bring to mind the whole of the associations with which the picture is connected. Subjects from mythology are far more hazardous, inasmuch indeed as the artist himself, and with him the many, are too