Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/32

 22 Journal of Philology. though various causes prevented him from receiving from the Romans the amount of praise and acknowledgment to which he was fairly entitled, yet the most famous of their poets must have carefully studied and deeply admired him. His contemporary Catullus gives frequent proofs of imitation ; Horace shews in his Odes, as well as in his Satires and Epistles, that he had atten- tively perused him; Ovid in his Metamorphoses and elsewhere has paraphrased whole passages of his poem; and Virgil has gleaned from it with unwearied diligence the most striking ex- pressions and turns of thought. He was not known to Dante and Petrarch, but Tasso has imitated parts of his poem. Moliere appears to have commenced his literary career by translating him ; and a fragment of this translation is imbedded in the Misanthrope (Act u. Sc. 5). Voltaire's admiration was great, but perhaps not disinterested. Among our own country- men, Spenser has given in the fourth book of the Faery Queen an exquisite paraphrase of the address to Venus ; Dryden has translated this and other passages ; Milton, and I believe Shakespeare, not unfrequently borrow from him thoughts and phrases. In our own days he has obtained high praise from Coleridge and Wordsworth; and Goethe tells us in a letter to Knebel that he had once had the intention of writing a special treatise on the relation of Lucretius to the times in which he lived. But, notwithstanding all this, fate or accident has dealt hardly with him. It is a curious fact that, while the Greek writers almost without exception were long-lived, hardly a single Latin poet passed the period of middle life ; and the two greatest poems of Rome were both left unfinished at the death of their authors. Lucretius was evidently of a morbid temper of mind ; Goethe wished to shew that circumstances made him necessarily an Epicurean ; but to me his disposition would appear to have been better suited to the doctrines of Zeno. Yet he is perhaps one among many other proofs how nearly allied the two systems were in reality, while, in appearance, exactly opposed to one an- other : contraries are always contained under the same genus. He seems to have found the times out of joint, and to have sought consolation in the cold apathy of epicureanism. With fiery elo- quence he preached the doctrine that tranquillity and repose were all sufficient for happiness ; " but thereof came in the end