CHAUCER. 177 



the triumphs of politics and jurisprudence than of art. Su 

 preme elegance it could and did arrive at in Virgil, but, if I 

 may trust my own judgment, it produced but one original 

 poet, and that was Horace, who has ever since continued the 

 favourite of men of the world, an apostle to the Gentiles of the 

 mild cynicism of middle-age and an after-dinner philosophy. 

 Though in no sense national, he was, more truly than any has 

 ever been since, till the same combination of circumstances 

 produced Beranger, an urbane or city poet. Rome, with her 

 motley life, her formal religion, her easy morals, her spectacles, 

 her luxury, her suburban country-life, was his muse. The situa 

 tion was new, and found a singer who had wit enough to turn it 

 to account. There are a half-dozen pieces of Catullus unsurpassed 

 (unless their Greek originals should turn up) for lyric grace and 

 fanciful tenderness. The sparrow of Lesbia still pecks the rosy 

 lips of his mistress, immortal as the eagle of Pindar. One 

 profound imagination, one man, who with a more prosperous 

 subject might have been a great poet, lifted Roman literature 

 above its ordinary level of tasteful common-sense. The invo 

 cation of Venus, as the genetic force of nature, by Lucretius, 

 seems to me the one sunburst of purely poetic inspiration which 

 the Latin language can show. But this very force, without 

 which neque Jit Icctum neque amabile quicqimm, was wholly 

 wanting in those poets of the post-classic period, through whom 

 the literary influences of the past were transmitted to the 

 romanized provincials. The works of Ausonius interest us as 

 those of our own Dwights and Barlows do. The Conquest of 

 Canaan and the * Columbiad were Connecticut epics no doubt, 

 but still were better than nothing in their day. If not literature, 

 they were at least memories of literature, and such memories 

 are not without effect in reproducing what they regret. The 

 provincial writers of Latin devoted themselves with a dreary 

 assiduity to the imitation of models which they deemed classi 

 cal, but which were truly so only in the sense that they were the 

 more decorously respectful of the dead form in proportion as 

 the living spirit had more utterly gone out of it. It is, I suspect, 

 to the traditions of this purely rhetorical influence, indirectly 

 exercised, that we are to attribute the rapid passage of the new 

 Provencal poetry from what must have been its original popular 

 character to that highly artificial condition which precedes total 

 extinction. It was the alienation of the written from the spoken 

 language (always, perhaps, more or less malignly operative in 

 giving Roman literature a cold-blooded turn as compared with 



