The music of this, with its beautiful imagery and refrains, is no doubt based upon an Alexandrian foundation. There is a distinct echo of Theocritus. But it is also distinctively Italian, and the greatest of modern Italian poets, Carducci, writes like a legitimate descendant of Catullus. Catullus has as little biography as Lucretius. He must have died at an early age in the fifties B.C. He was a poor man. He had only a town house and two villas, one on the Lago di Garda and one at Tivoli. He hated Cæsar and loved Cicero. That his “Lesbia” was the infamous Clodia is generally asserted. I do not believe it. These two poets, Lucretius and Catullus, then, stand almost alone as representatives of Republican Roman literature on the poetical side. Both are Romanising various Alexandrian Greek modes, but both have something genuinely Roman, a quality which we may best describe as virility, to add to their originals. This was the point from which a genuine Roman literature might have taken its departure. Instead of that, the next era is that of a courtly school of classicists, largely writing to order, who gave to Latin its distinctively classical bent. Cicero, the most classical of all classics, is, however, far the greatest literary product of the Republic. He is, indeed, far too vast a figure for these modest pages. By his colossal industry and immense fertility of genius his influence dominates the whole field of Latin prose literature. He is not only the greatest of all orators, but he stands as the type of the orator in life as in literature. We of this generation, who live in the eclipse of rhetoric, do not find it easy to be just to him. With such gifts of eloquence, such a power of uttering tremendous phrases about duty and patriotism, we cannot but feel affronted at his political incapacity. Mommsen, who is all for action, peppers him with contemptuous expressions--“a statesman without insight, opinion or purpose”; “a short-sighted egoist”; “a journalist of the worst description”; “his lawyer’s talent of finding excuses--or, at any rate, words--for everything.” And, indeed, among men like Cæsar with legions at their backs, or creatures like Clodius with their packs of hooligans, a man of golden words and honest principles does cut a sorry figure on the pages of history--so much the worse for history! He had, as we have seen, a policy, his talents made him a leader among the moderates of the senate, and his character made him genuinely popular among all the more respectable classes of society. But Rhetoric is one of the feminine Muses, and Cicero’s nature was as soft and sympathetic as a woman’s. So he turns his coat at a word from Pompeius, utters brave words one day and eats them on the next, publishes magnificent denunciations which he has not had the courage to deliver. Moreover, we see his intimate thoughts revealed in all the frankness of an unexpurgated private correspondence--and there are few statesmen,