LATIN LITERATURE.* To write, upon a very large subject, a

book at once extremely short and extremely good is a rare achievement. It is more especially difficult to do so when the subject to be treated ie. one about which a great many people know a good deal, and to which almost all educated men have given no small amount of attention. This, however, is the feat that has been per- formed by the author of this admirable little manna),—for as a manual in a series of manuals it has made its modest appearance in the world. It was intended at first that it should be written by William Sellar, the Professor of Humanity in the University of Edinburgh, an elder brother of Mr. A. C. Seller, who held, during the latter years of his life, so honourable a position in the representation of Scot- land. Professor Seller, who was a man of very great ability, would have done the work exceedingly well ; but it is no dis- paragement to him to say that he would hardly have produced such a masterpiece as this,—a book which will be read with equal delight by the intelligent sixth-form boy and by those who look back on their sixth-form days through a. vista of fifty busy years.

Mr. Mackail begins with the peace of B.C. 241 and the removal of the overwhelming pressure of Carthage upon Rome. A very few pages are given to sketching in outline what is known of the pioneers of Latin history, from Androni- cus, the Greek prisoner of war who conquered his conquerors, down to Accius, the last and perhaps the greatest of the tragedians of Rome. Then Plautus and Terence are treated with the respect they deserve, but without any tendency to exaggerate their merits. Mr. Mackail would assuredly not have fired up as did Cardinal Newman when the late Lord

• Latin Literature. By .1. W. Mackail, sometime Fellow of Balllol Oollege, Oxford. London: John Hurray.

Coleridge spoke of the second of these as a " halved Menander." He thought that his friend was damning his favourite with faint praise, and Lord Coleridge bad to write back to say, " The criticism, whether right or wrong, is not mine but Julies Cmsar's."

The third chapter traces the commencement of Latin prose, which began with the texts of codes and the annals of the Republic, as became a race whose two distinctive works were law and government. A few touches bring out the dim figures of the earliest Roman orators and the far more clearly seen personality of Cato. The fourth and fifth chapters belong to Lucretius and Catalina. Mr. Mackail might dissent from the judgment of Mrs. Barrett Browning,-

" Lucretius, nobler than his mood,

Who dropped his plummet down the broad, Deep univt;:se, and cried, No God, Finding no bottom. He denied Divinely the divine, and died Chief poet on the Tiber-side."

He would keep, we suspect, that supreme place for Virgil and "the golden cadence of his poesy ; " but the strain, he says, "that Lucretius breathes through bronze is statelier and more

sonorous than any other in the stately and sonorous Roman speech." He does the very fullest justice to the extraordinary powers of that great man and his intuitions of scientific troth," nor less to his moral temper, his profound insight into life. "The Epicurean philosophy," he observes, "in the hands of Lucretius has all the ennobling influence of a religion." This, the fourth chapter, does not yield to any in the book.

The sketch of Catalina is hardly less remarkable, and Mr. Mackail, in treating of the Epithalamiam, draws the attention of his reader to "its clear, ringing music and almost unique premonition of the new world that rose out of the darkness of the Middle Ages, the world that had invented bells and church- organs, and had added a new romantic beauty to love and marriage." In the account of Cicero we have none of the over-laudation which was once bestowed upon the great orator, and none of the captious criticism which has in these latter clays been directed against him as a statesman. Mr. Mackail puts his finger upon his unique and imperishable glory in not only having created a language which remained for sixteen hundred years that of the civilised world, but in having called into being what is practically the prose of the human race. The judgments on the Augustan poets of their latest critic are those which have commended themselves to the best of his predecessors. He has no paradoxes, no startling " cleverisms," but he has learnt to perfection the art " proprie communia dicere." Take as an example the following pas- sage on the author of that famous phrase. Mr. Mackail is writing of the first three books of the Odes.

"Before a volume of which every other line is as familiar as a proverb, which embodies in a quintessential form that imperish- able delight of literature to which the great words of Cicero already quoted give such beautiful expression, whose phrases are on all men's lips as those of hardly any other ancient author have been, criticism is almost silenced. In the brief and graceful epilogue, Horace claims for himself, with no uncertainty and with no arrogance, such eternity as earth can give. The claim was completely just. The school-book of the European world, the Odes have been no less for nineteen centuries the companions of mature years and the delight of age- ' adoleacentiam agunt, senectutem oblectant,' may be said of them with as much truth as ever now. Yet no analysis will explain their indefinable charm. If the so-called lyrical cry' be of the essence of a true lyric, they are not true lyrics at all. Few of them are free from a marked artificiality, an almost rigid adherence to canon. Their range of thought is not great ; their range of feeling is studiously narrow. Beside the air and fire of a lyric of Catullus an ode of Horace for the moment grows pale and heavy, eineris specie decoloratur.' Beside one of the pathetic half-lines of Virgil, with their broken gleams and murmurs as of another world, a Horatian phrase loses lustre and sound. Yet Horace appeals to a tenhAd larger audience than Catullus —to a larger audience, it may even be said, than Virgil. Nor is he a poet's poet ; the refined and ex- quisite technique of the Odes may be only appreciable by a trained artist in language ; but it is the untrained mind, on whom other art falls flat, that the art of Horace, by some unique penetrative power, kindles and quickens. His own phrase of ' golden mediocrity' expresses with some truth the paradox of his poetry ; in no other poet, ancient or modern, has such studied and unintermitted mediocrity been wrought in pure gold."

There are few readers, we dare venture to say, who will not learn a good deal from the last chapter of the second section of the book, that on the lesser Augustans, or who will not thank the writer of it for having made the extracts which he has from the Astronomica of Manilins.

When the " Urbs " expanded into the " Orbis," the " Urbanus Sermo," that austere and noble language, as Mr. Mackail calls it, which was the finest flower of her civilisation, passed away with it. Then came the period of the provinces. We are glad that right is done in the book before us to Lucan, surely

too much neglected in our days. A model he is no doubt rather for the orator than for the poet, as Quintilian said long ago, and Lord Ellenborough, whose right to speak upon such a subject, all who ever listened to him would admit, repeated in the last generation. A long and appreciative notice is given to Petronins, but Mr. Mackail rests far short of the panegyric which the writer of this article once heard poured forth upon that author, perhaps only half seriously, by the excellent but eccentric scholar who formed so interesting a link between the poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mr. T. L. Peacock. Persias is very sympathetically treated, and is evidently a favourite with our author. We are sorry to see that he cannot find any historical foundation for the story of the conversion of Stating to Christianity, so familiar to readers of the Pargatorio. A singularly beautiful poem by that writer upon sleep is quoted at p. 189. The paragraphs on Qnintilian contain more unfamiliar knowledge than do those on Tacitus, good as these last are. We are pleased to observe that special attention is called to the wonderful description of the Third Legion saluting the rising sun after the night battle of Bedriacnm, assuredly one of the most striking and fateful incidents in all history. Few readers will have forgotten that passage ; but to most, on the other hand, the paragraph which follows the allusion to it in Mr. Mackail's book, with its exposition of the way in which Virgil's account of the destruction of Troy has been used by Tacitus in his description of the burning of the capital, will be entirely new.

The fifth chapter of the third part on the "Elocutio Novella," the language of Apnleius and of Fronto, is one of the freshest in the volume, for with it we pass into a region which, till recently, was rarely traversed. The old-fashioned curriculum knew nothing even of the divinely beautiful " Pervigiliam Veneris," to which full justice is here done, justice which will, we trust, make happier even in the Elysian Fields, the shades of its unknown writer and of the like- minded author of that delightful book, Marius the Epicurean.

With the sixth chapter of the third section we pass to the early Christian writers, Minucins Felix, Tertullian, Lactantius, and others, of whom few of us, the more is the pity, know much. Ansonius and Clandian are a little, if only a little, more familiar to the ordinary reader; but how many of us know anything of Pradentius, whose poems, we are told, "at once represent the most substantial addition made to Latin lyrical poetry since Horace and the complete triumph of the new religion " ? The last chapter brings face to face with admirable skill Rutilius and Augustine. The first, who belonged entirely to the elder Gods, addressed to the "fading mistress of the world " a really splendid eulogy quoted on p. 276, a eulogy which we venture to say no one who has once read it will ever forget as he passes through the Ostian Gate. The second, the author of The City of God, wrote that ever memorable description of the conversation between his mother and himself at Ostia, which we wish it had occurred to Mr. Mackail to quote. The two totally dissimilar views of life which then divided the world, far as the poles asunder, could not receive more characteristic or brilliant expression.

We wonder if Mr. Mackail will be ever tempted to write the history of Latin literature on the scale on which Mr. Dunlop wrote a fragment of it some seventy years ago. That would be a work of many years; but in the meantime is there no hope that some committee of competent and authoritative scholars may revise the list of Latin books read by the ordinary student, who carries on his education to two or three and twenty ? It fails in every possible way,— here by being too wide, there by being too narrow; yet there is no reason why everything that is supremely good in Latin literature should not be read during the school and college course, if only what is valueless or mediocre be sternly excluded and no time wasted in composition. By all means let those who have that particular literary faculty which lends itself to clever imitation be encourged to write Latin verse or Latin prose by special rewards. To imitate Cicero or Ovid

skilfully is a very pretty pastime, and it is a pity that its votaries should die out. If, however, the ancients are not, in the words of Sainte-Beuve, " sooner or later to lose the battle," their friends must put the study of them upon a rational basis. You will agree,' they ought to say, that the object of a literary training is to bring the mind of the pupil into contact with the best things that men have said. It is absurd to pretend that you can do this without giving a share, and a respectable share, of time to the best things that have been said in Latin ; but we freely grant that the number of studies which now require to be mastered by those who wish to give themselves every chance in life is so great .that we must most rigidly limit the programme to what cannot possibly be omitted.'

This most valuable book, alike by what it praises and blames in Latin literature, ought, in addition to its more obvious uses, to have some indirect influence in attracting attention to the question, How can we best reconcile the study of the ancient languages, in early life, with the imperative demands of modern science and literature ?