Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/33

 On Lucretius. 23 despondency and madness." He perished by his own hand during a fit of frenzy, in the 44th year of his age, leaving the last five books of his poem incomplete ; and it appears to have been unskilfully prepared for publication after his death. This was not however his only mishap. The Augustan poets attained so exclusive a popularity, that the greater part of the older poetical literature fell soon into comparative neglect. The Ro- mans, moreover, as Quintilian informs us, found Lucretius diffi- cult to understand. And thus it came to pass that only a single mutilated manuscript survived the wreck of ancient literature ; and many of his verses have been lost to us beyond recovery. After the revival of learning a succession of editors attempted to restore his text, often at the expense of the author's mean- ing. Even the greatest of them, Lambinus, unsurpassed as a Latin scholar, but a sorry philosopher, has too often given us a mere kAWos KaK&v vnovXov, serviug only to obscure the meaning by concealing from us our ignorance. At length Wakefield, pro- fessing to restore the text by a collation of several manuscripts and old editions, rendered " confusion worse confounded" by a total misapprehension of the true state of the case, introducing as the genuine words of the poet the merest blunders of copyists, and adding to this a rashness and unconscientiousness almost without example. I have this moment before me a collation of our Cambridge manuscript, and I find that Wakefield is as fre- quently wrong as right in the readings which he cites from it. Thus he filled with the grossest barbarisms a writer whose latinity is as pure as that of Caesar or Terence ; and explained these in defiance alike of sense and grammar. Madvig was the first to give a hint of the right method of proceeding. This was done much more completely by Jac. Bernays of Bonn in a dis- sertation based on a collation of the two Leyden manuscripts and published in the Rhenish Museum for 1847. To this essay Lachmann has hardly done justice : I do not mean to say that he could not have done all that he did without it, but it cer- tainly anticipates him in several of his discoveries. But these dawnings of the truth were soon lost in the blaze of Lachmann's edition, which placed the criticism of Lucretius once and for ever on a sure basis. It is not my intention to dilate here on what he has done; this can be best seen by referring to the work itself. We learn from his biographer that he spent upon