They were not equally successful in all the forms which they attempted to reproduce. They were especially inferior to their masters in tragedy. They betray the inferiority of their dramatic genius also in other fields of literature, especially in epic and idyllic poetry, and in philosophical dialogues. They express passion and feeling either directly from their own hearts and experience, or in great rhetorical passages, attributed to the imaginary personages of their story--to Ariadne or Dido, to Turnus or Mezentius. But this occasional utterance of passion and sentiment is not united in them with a vivid delineation of the complex characters of men; and it is only in their comic poetry that they are quite successful in reproducing the natural and lively interchange of speech. There is thus, as compared with Homer and Theocritus, some want of personal interest in the epic, descriptive, and idyllic poetry of Virgil. The natural play of characters, acting and reacting upon one another, enlivens the divinely-appointed action of the Aeneid, only in such exceptional passages as the episode of Dido; nor does it add the charm of human associations to the poet's deep and quiet pictures of rural beauty, and to his graceful expression of pensive and tender feeling. The Romans, as a race, were wanting in speculative capacity; and thus their poetry does not rise, or rises only in Lucretius, to those imaginative heights from which the great lyrical and dramatic poets of Greece contemplated the spectacle of human life in all its wonder and solemnity. Yet both the epic and the lyrical poetry of Rome have a character and perfection of their own. The Aeneid, with many resemblances in points of detail to the poems of Homer, is yet, in design and execution, a true national monument. The lyrical poetry of Rome, if inferior to the choral poetry of Greece in range of thought and in ethereal grace of expression, and, apparently, to the early Iambic and Melic poetry of Greece in the range of the emotions to which it appeals, is yet an instrument of varied power, capable of investing the more serious or more transient joys and sorrows of life with an unfading charm, and rising into fuller and more commanding tones to express the national sentiment and moral dignity of Rome. Didactic poetry obtained in Lucretius and Virgil ampler volume and profounder meaning than in their Greek models, Empedocles and Hesiod. It was by the skill of the two great Latin poets that poetic art was made to embrace within its province the treatment of a great philosophical argument, and of a great and ancient form of human industry. The Satires and Epistles of Horace showed, for the first time, how the didactic spirit could deal in poetry with the whole conduct and familiar experience of life. The elegiac poets of the Augustan age, while borrowing the metre of their compositions from the early poets of Ionia and the later writers at the court of Alexandria,