In one sense Lucilius might be called a moderniser, for he strove hard to enlarge the people's knowledge and views; but in another and higher sense he was strictly national: luxury, bribery, and sloth, were to him the very poison of all true life, and cut at the root of those virtues by which alone Rome could remain great. This national spirit caused him to be preferred to Horace by conservative minds in the time of Tacitus, but it probably made his critics somewhat over-indulgent. Horace, with all his admiration for him, cannot shut his eyes to his evident faults, [24] the rudeness of his language, the carelessness of his composition, the habit of mixing Greek and Latin words, which his zealous admirers construed into a virtue, and, last but not least, the diffuseness inseparable from a hasty draft which he took no trouble to revise. Still his elegance of language must have been considerable. Pliny speaks of him as the first to establish a severe criticism of style, [25] and the fragments reveal beneath the obscuring garb of his uncouth hexameters, a terse and pure idiom not unlike that of Terence. His faults are numerous, [26] but do not seriously detract from his value. The loss of his works must be considered a serious one. Had they been extant we should have found useful information in his pictures of life and manners in a state of moral transition, amusement in such pieces as his journal of a progress from Rome to Capua, [27] and material for philological knowledge in his careful distinctions of orthography and grammar. As a favourable specimen of his style, it will be sufficient to quote his definition of virtue: "Virtus, Albine, est pretium persolvere verum Quis in versamur, quis vivimus rebus potesse. Virtus est homini scire id quod quaeque habeat res. Virtus scire homini rectum, utile, quid sit honestum, Quae bona, quae mala item, quid inutile, turpe, inhonestum. Virtus, quaerendae finem rei scire modumque; Virtus divitiis pretium persolvere posse. Virtus, id dare quod reipsa debetur honori, Hostem esse atque inimicum hominum morumque malorum Contra, defensorem hominum morumque bonorum; Magnificare hos, his bene velle, his vivere amicum; Commoda praeterea patriai prima putare, Deinde parentum, tertia iam postremaque nostra."