Note 46 — Chapter VIII

If we regard these passages as on the ordinary level of his style we cannot hesitate to recognise his immense inferiority to Terence in elegance and finish46, and to Plautus in rich and humorous exuberance of expression. There is scarcely a trace of imaginative power, or of susceptibility to the grandeur and pathos of human life, or to the beauty and sublimity of Nature in the thousand lines of his remains. We find a few vivid touches, as in this half-line—