In this allusion to lyrical poetry, I have not spoken of Catullus, unrivaled in tender lyric, and the greatest poet before the Augustan era. He was born B.C. 87, and enjoyed the friendship of the most celebrated characters. One hundred and sixteen of his poems have come down to us, most of which are short, and many of them defiled by great coarseness and sensuality. Critics say, however, that whatever he touched he adorned; that his vigorous simplicity, pungent wit, startling invective, and felicity of expression, make him one of the great poets of the Latin language. [Sidenote: Lucretius.] In didactic poetry, Lucretius was preeminent, and is regarded by Schlegel as the first of Roman poets in native genius. [Footnote: Born B.C. 95, died B.C. 52. Smith's _Dict._] He lived before the Augustan era, and died at the age of forty-two by his own hand. His great poem "De Rerum Natura," is a delineation of the epicurean philosophy, and treats of all the great subjects of thought with which his age is conversant. It somewhat resembles Pope's "Essay on Man," in style and subject, but immeasurably superior in poetical genius. It is a lengthened disquisition, in seven thousand four hundred lines, of the great phenomena of the outward world. As a painter and worshiper of nature, he was superior to all the poets of antiquity. His skill in presenting abstruse speculations is marvelous, and his outbursts of poetic genius are matchless in power and beauty. Into all subjects he casts a fearless eye, and writes with sustained enthusiasm. But he was not fully appreciated by his countrymen, although no other poet has so fully brought out the power of the Latin language. Professor Ramsay, [Footnote: The translation of Lucretius into English was made by I. M. Goode, Evelyn, and Drummond.] while alluding to the melancholy tenderness of Tibullus, the exquisite ingenuity of Ovid, the inimitable felicity and taste of Horace, the gentleness and splendor of Virgil, and the vehement declamation of Juvenal, thinks that, had the verses of Lucretius perished, we should never have known that it could give utterance to the grandest conceptions with all that self-sustained majesty and harmonious swell, in which the Grecian muse rolls forth her loftiest outpourings. The eulogium of Ovid is-- "Carmina sublimis tune sunt peritura Lucreti, Exitio terras quum dabit una dies." [Sidenote: Ovid.]