of life alien to modern
experience. Nobody could have previously doubted that he possessed
fancy, but he has added to it the higher faculty of Imagination. We have
not been able to detect, in the four poems, one idea or feeling which
was not, or might not have been Roman; while the externals of Roman
life, and the feelings characteristic of Rome and of that particular
age, are reproduced with great felicity, and without being made unduly
predominant over the universal features of human nature and human life.

Independently therefore of their value as poems, these compositions are
a real service rendered to historical literature; and the author has
made this service greater by his prefaces, which will do more than the
work of a hundred dissertations in rendering that true conception of
early Roman history, the irrefragable establishment of which has made
Niebuhr illustrious, familiar to the minds of general readers. This is
no trifling matter, even in relation to present interests, for there is
no estimating the injury which the cause of popular institutions has
suffered, and still suffers from misrepresentations of the early
condition of the Roman and Plebs, and its noble struggles against its
taskmasters. And the study of the manner in which the heroic legends of
early Rome grew up as poetry and gradually became history, has important
bearings on the general laws of historical evidence, and on the many
things which, as philosophy advances, are more and more seen to be
therewith connected. On this subject Mr. Macaulay has not only
presented, in an agreeable form, the results of previous speculation,
but has, though in an entirely unpretending manner, thrown additional
light upon it by his own remarks: as where he shows, by incontestible
instances, that a similar transformation of poetic fiction into history
has taken place on various occasions in modern and sceptical times....

We are more disposed to break a lance with our author on the general
merits of Roman literature, which, by a heresy not new with him, he
sacrifices, in what appears to us a most unfair degree, on the score of
its inferior originality to the Grecian. It is true the Romans had no
Aeschylus nor Sophocles, and but a secondhand Homer, though this last
was not only the most finished but even the most original of imitators.
But where was the Greek model of the noble poem of Lucretius? What,
except the mere idea, did the Georgics borrow from Hesiod? and