We see in these lines a practical and unselfish standard--that of the cultivated but still truly patriotic Roman, admitting the necessity of knowledge in a way his ancestors might have questioned, but keeping steadily to the main points of setting a true price upon all human things, and preferring the good of one's country to personal advantage. This is a morality intelligible to all, and if it falls below the higher enlightenment of modern, knowledge, it at least soars above the average practice. We are informed [28] that Lucilius did not spare his immediate predecessors and contemporaries in literature any more than in politics. He attacked Accius for his unauthorised innovations in spelling, Pacuvius and Ennius for want of a sustained level of dignity. His satire seems to have ranged over the whole field of life, so far as it was known to him; and though his learning was in no department deep, [29] it was sound so far as it went, and was guided by natural good taste. He will always retain an interest for us from the charming picture given by Horace of his daily life; how he kept his books beside him like the best of friends, as indeed they were, and whatever he felt, thought, or saw, intrusted to their faithful keeping, whence it comes that the man's life stands as vividly before one's eyes as if it had been painted on a votive tablet. Then the way in which Laelius and Scipio unbent in his company, mere youth as he was compared to them, gives us a pleasing notion of his social gifts; he who could make the two grave statesmen so far forget their decorum as to romp in the manner Horace describes, must at least have been gifted with contagious light-heartedness. This genial humour Horace tried with success to reproduce, but he is conscious of inferiority to the master. In English literature Dryden is the writer who most recalls him, though rather in his higher than in his more sportive moods. CHAPTER VIII. THE MINOR DEPARTMENTS OF POETRY--THE ATELLANAE (POMPONIUS AND NOVIUS, CIRC. 90 B.C.) AND THE EPIGRAM (ENNIUS--CATULUS, 100 B.C.).