Note 289 — CHAPTER 1. BEFORE QUINTILIAN—CICERO, HORACE, SENECA THE ELDER, VARRO.

Poet. Lat. Min. (Baehrens), vi. 139-266. Our greatest English Latinists recently have been singularly unkind to this poet. Munro made what I can only call a violent attack on him: and Mr Nettleship, while allowing him “extraordinary vigour” and “the ring of Caius Gracchus” (see his Essay on the Satires (second series),series), where Munro’s diatribe is quoted), practically indorses this. Against such judges I should not have a word to say on the linguistic side: but I claim full parrhesia on the literary. The Virtue passage (which Munro specially refuses to except) is as rough as, say, Marston; but it has a far sincerer, loftier, and more truly poetical tone than anything of the kind in Horace, and than most things in Juvenal. And everywhere I see quality, passion, phrase. Here, at least, I can agree with Cicero (De Orat., ii. 6 and elsewhere), though perurbanus is not exactly the epithet that I should, from his extant writings, myself select for Lucilius.