CHAUCER. 239 



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

 the favorite of men of the world, an apostle to the Gen- 

 tiles 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 ur- 

 bane 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 situation 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, im- 

 mortal 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 in- 

 vocation 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 ketum, neque 

 amabile guicquam was wholly wanting in those poets of 

 the post-classic period, through whom the literary in- 

 fluences 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 theif 

 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 classical, 

 but which were truly so only in the sense that they 



