Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/289

 writing and appreciation of poetry depend on kindly and genial sensibility, if imagination itself depends on the existence of some genuine sense of human brotherhood, be it wide as the world or narrow as the clan, we must admit that the social life of Imperial Rome was such as must destroy any literature. The Stoic maxim, "to watch the world and imitate it," may seem to us a fine thought finely expressed; but the world of the Roman had become a microcosm too small and selfish to suggest anything of that universe by participation in which we rise out of our individual littleness. The philosophy of self-culture could do little but aggravate the miseries of such an age. No renovation of a perishing society was to be expected from that isolating individual culture which had breathed its poison into Roman literature in its Greek fosterage, and now