CLAUDIAN.* WE heartily welcome any effort that may be made

to extend the narrow limits of our classical culture. The energy with which this culture is pursued is, it may be allowed, by no means incon- siderable, but it has its origin in motives which naturally contract its scope. A Cambridge student would be considered culpably indifferent to success and the magnificent prizes of success, were he to extend his researches beyond the limits of "passages likely to be set," and examiners do not set except out of authors of the best or second-best periods. The Oxford system narrows still more the range of reading. It does not deny the highest honours to candidates who may be wholly unacquainted with some of even the greatest works in Greek and Roman literature. A student may even find his way into the first class at the first and second public examination who has never looked into Pinder, into Aristophanes (such, at least, is our impression), into Theocritus, into Plautus or Terence, or into any of the poets of the post-Augustan period, Juvenal only excepted. As for Claudian, his very name is probably unknown, except, it may be, to a few enthusiastic students of Latin verse. That no edition of him

Claudian: the Last of the Roman Poets. Two Lectures delivered before the Literary and Philosophical Society, Newcastle-on-Tyne. By Thomas Hodgkin, BA., Loud. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: A.Reld. London: Longmans and Co. 1878.

should have appeared for at least a century in this country is not surprising. No classics are edited in England except for scholastic or academical purposes. But it is an almost discredit- able fact that inquiries made, as they were made a few months since by the present writer, for a second-hand copy should have been fruitless. It is a curious fact to find a graduate of one of the younger Universities lecturing to an audience in the "metropolis of coal," on an author so entirely neglected in the traditional seat of English classical learning. More able and appreciative treatment than that which Mr. Hodgkin gives to his subject could not be desired. We feel, then, that every one jealous for the honour of Oxford will be inclined to say of him, "Cum talis sis, utinam foster eases !"

The subject, indeed, is one of remarkable interest, an interest both literary and political. In literature, Claudian, in whatever period he might have happened to live, would certainly have made his mark. His appearance among the degraded poetasters and dull chroniclers of the close of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century is little less than a prodigy. We sometimes wonder at the great soldiers whom Rome produced in her decline, at Stilicho, Narses, Aetius, and Belisarius. But military genius is a simple product, which it requires only a vigorous soil to grow, and though the old Roman stock was exhausted, there was vigour ever renewed in the barbarian nationalities which the Empire in- corporated with itself. Literary power of the first class requires for its existence a multiplicity of conditions which seldom co- exist. It is like the flower which blooms once in the hundred years of an aloe's life. There must be culture, or it will be un- formed; the culture must be fresh, not worn out or conventional- ised by time, or it will be feeble. For this reason, therefore, the engrafted vigour of a new race does not help. In fact, the non- Roman nationality of Claudian increases the marvel of his literary excellence. Egypt was his birth-place ; his race was Greek, not without, it is at least probable, some admixture of Coptic blood. The language of his childhood and youth, whatever it was, was not Latin. What he achieved under such circumstances is almost without parallel. As Mr. Hodgkin puts it :— " By tho confession of his contemporaries and by the judgment of posterity, he wielded the resources of his adopted language with a facility and a fluency of which they were destitute. In him the fading flower of Roman verse seemed to experience a second spring ; the spell of three centuries of decadence was for a moment interrupted, or even reversed, and the late-born foreigner claimed—not altogether unsuc- cessfully—a place near to, if not absolutely by the side of, the minstrels of the Augustan ago. We consider it, and very justly, a literary marvel when a young Englishman like Arthur Hallam writes Italian sonnets. with accuracy and elegance ; when a German like Max Miiller delivers lectures to an English audience with clearness and fluency ; but Claudian's poetry is as if Hallam had produced sonnets worthy of Fetrarch, or as if Mfiller's lectures were in the style of Addison."

We are scarcely inclined to agree with Mr. Hodgkin when he says. that "the religious aspect of Claudian's writings is yet stranger

than the literary." Indeed, we doubt whether he was what he is here represented as being, an adherent of the old faith, or any- how, a stranger to the new. To our minds, the mythological machinery with which his poetry is filled seems to prove nothing. This was the common-place of poets, and it required a genius more original than Claudian's, or than was, perhaps, possible in those days to discard it. Who would not have supposed that the sense of the ludicrous would have forbidden its introduction into historical poems, yet the Punica of Silius Italicus are full of it ; Juno, for instance, carries off her favourite Hannibal in a cloud ; yet we have no reason to suppose that the incident seemed to readers who believed no more in Juno than we do anything but an allowable play of the imagination. It may well have been nothing more than the accidental remoteness of the subjects with which he dealt that kept Christianity out of Claudian's pages.

With our author's general estimate of the poet's excellences and defects we thoroughly agree. It is an estimate that indicates in the writer much power of historical as well as of literary insight. The following seems to us excellent :—

" What, then, is the merit of Claudian as a poet? First and foremost, it seems to me, a true poetic insight into the grandeur of Rome. Roma is the real Muse from whom he derives his highest inspiration. When he is speaking of her glories when he is describing the great deeds of the heroes who built up the fabric of her empire, he is never tame, never cold, never artificial. Here, if nowhere else, he speaks from the heart, and his language rises with the sublimity of his theme. That such a genuine enthusiasm could have been instilled into the mind of a Hellen- istic Egyptian by the history of that Italian Oily, is a most important fact. It is a most erroneous conception which we form when we think of the Roman Empire as consisting of a number of nationalities hold down by her iron hand and longing to be free. Rome possessed that great art—which we certainly do not possess, which perhaps no modern nation except Franco can lay claim to—of making her subject-peoples love her; nay, more, of amalgamating them with herself, and making

them bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh; even as we have seen the inhabitant of Maass, a province filched from Germany within recent historic memory, cling to the bosom of his foster-mother though scarcely able to speak her language, and protest with an agony of remonstrance

against being reclaimed by his Teutonic, brethren. So the proud words, Civis Romanus sum,' were repeated with every variety of accent, not only by Paul of Tarsus, 'a citizen of no mean city,' but by the Spaniard and the Egyptian ; by the Briton, who addressed his groans to Aetius, and by the citizen of Nisibis, in Mesopotamia, who regretted with passionate lamentation that separation from the empire which the disastrous issue of Julian's expedition rendered inevitable. We have 210 time now to inquire Wherein consisted this peculiar aptitude of the Roman race for not only conquering, but attaching to themselves the people conquered. A part, but far from the whole of the answer is con- tained in the well-known words of Paul to Festus—' Seeing that by thee we enjoy great quietness,'—words which are at once recalled to us by this expression of Claudian's,—'Et vitae Romana quies:'

And life's great quiet, which she owes to Rome.

The nations so long harassed by the objectless, endless wars of Greek against Greek, and Greek against barbarian, found rest and prosperity under the world-wide shadow of Rome."

And he proceeds to quote a fine passage from the third book of the " Laudes Stilichonis," of which we shall give the concluding lines :—

" Rome Rome! alone has found the spell to charm The tribes that fell beneath her conquering arm, Has given one name to the whole human race, And clasped and sheltered them in fond embrace, Mother, not mistress, called her foe her son, And by soft ties made distant countries one. This to her peaceful sceptre all men owe— That through the nations, wheresoe'er we go, Strangers, we find a fatherland ; our home We change at will; may watch the fax-off foam Break upon Thule's shore and call it play, Or through dim, dreadful forests force our way, That we may tread Orontes', Ebro's shore— That we are all one nation, evermore!"

The reader will be glad to see, supposing that his library is not better furnished than Oxford book-shops, the four finest lines of the original :—

" HMO eat in greminm victoa gum sola recepit, Humanumque genus communi nomine fovit, Matris, non dominar, ritu ; civesque vocavit Quos domuit, nexuque pio longinqua revinxit."

A love of nature, not unlike the modern sentiment on the sub- ject, is, as Mr. Hodgkin remarks, another characteristic of the poet. It is noteworthy, as indicating that the poet probably repre- sented a growing tendency of his time, that Ausonius, for the most part far inferior to his predecessor, in this respect much resembles him. The earlier part of the "De Raptu Proserpinm," a poem of which Mr. Hodgkin omits all notice, as having a purely literary interest, is rich in such passages. We may quote for the benefit of our readers a few lines from the "tapestry of Proserpine

Nec color units adest ; stellas aceendit in auro, Ostro fundit aquas, attollit litora gemmis, /limn° mentitos jamjam caelantia fluctus Arte tument ; erodes illidi cautibus algam, Et /anemia bibulis inserpere murmur arenis. Addit quinque plagas: mediam subtemine rubro Obsessam fervor° notat: squalebat adustus Limes, et assiduo sitiebant stamina sole. Vitales utrinque duns, quas mitis oberrat Temperies, habitanda vine: turn fine supremo Torpentes traxit geminaa, bramaque perenni Fcedat, et aeterrto contristat frigoro telas."

Hodgkin continues

After all, however, the great merit which I am disposed to claim for Clandian is his wonderful power over words; and herein, as well as in some other points of his literary character, be seems to me to be best -understood by comparing him to Lord Byron. Neither poet could tell an epic story epically ; neither gives II8 any delicately-drawn pictures .of human character ; both often repeat themselves with most wearisome iteration ; both push their declamation sometimes into bombast, and sometimes let it descend into the depths of common-place ; but both have a power, in which I suspect they were unequalled by any of their contemporaries—except, perhaps, St. Augustine in the one case and Shelley in the other—of putting together words into phrases of un- surpassable magnificence."

And he quotes as instances the phrases,—

" Urbs aequaeva polo;"

"Nunquamibertaa gratior exstat, Qnam sub rege pio."

It might be expected that such an author would frequently be quoted. We turned on opening Mr. Hodgkin's little book to see whether he had been struck, as we remember ourselves to have been, by the one Parliamentary quotation from Claudian which bas achieved celebrity, and found that he had been. This pro- ceeded not from Mr. Gladstone, who, though happy and original in this respect, keeps to the somewhat narrow Oxford round, but from Mr. Disraeli, who, as becomes the son of a father who wrote Curiosities of Literature, goes to more recondite sources. In this case, it was as happy as it was novel. To apply to the white head of the Duke of Wellington, so well known to all Londoners, the words :—

"Stilichonis apex et caputa falsit Canities,"

was a stroke of genius, though it might be suggested that the curious word apex is used with a special reference to Stilicho's towering stature.

The name of Stilicho reminds us that we are obliged to pass by what is a very vigorous and interesting sketch of that great General. We must not, however, omit a word of well-merited praise for the translations with which the lectures are interspersed, translations that are executed with a quite uncommon felicity.