Note 280 — CHAPTER 1. BEFORE QUINTILIAN—CICERO, HORACE, SENECA THE ELDER, VARRO.

It has been urged upon me that my judgment of Cicero’s verse is rather harsh, and that he at any rate made some progress towards the Lucretian hexameter before Lucretius. It may be so; tolerably careful and tolerably wide students of literature know that these things are always “in the air,” and that, sometimes if not always, you find them in the poetaster before you find them in the poet. But after reading all Cicero’s extant verse two or three times over, seeking diligently for mitigations of judgment, I am still afraid that “Cousin Cicero, you will never be a poet,” would have been, and justly, the verdict of Lucretius, had they stood to one another in the relations in which Swift and Dryden stood.