whoever
thinks of comparing the two poems? Where, in Homer or the Euripides,
will be found the original of the tender and pathetic passages in the
Aeneid, especially the exquisitely told story of Dido? There is no
extraordinary merit in the "Carmen Secculare" as we have it, the only
production of Horace which challenges comparison with Pindar; although
we are not among those who deem Pindar one of the brightest stars in the
Greek heaven. But from whom are the greater part of Horace's _Carmina_
borrowed (they should never be termed Odes), any more than those of
Burns or Beranger, the analogous authors in modern times? and by what
Greek minor poems are they surpassed? We say nothing of Catullus, whom
some competent judges prefer to Horace. Does the lyric, then, or even
the epic poetry of the Romans, deserve no better title than that of "a
hot-house plant, which, in return for assiduous and skilful culture,
yielded only scanty and sickly fruits?" The complete originality and
eminent merit of their satiric poetry, Mr. Macaulay himself
acknowledges. As for prose, we give up Cicero as compared with
Demosthenes, but with no one else; and is Livy less original, or less
admirable, than Herodotus? Tacitus may have imitated, even to
affectation, the condensation of Thucydides, as Milton imitated the
Greek and Hebrew poets; but was the mind of the one as essentially
original as that of the other? Is the Roman less an unapprochable
master, in his peculiar line, that of sentimental history, than the
Grecian in his? and what Greek historian has written anything similar or
comparable to the sublime peroration of the _Life of Agricola_? The
Latin genius lay not in speculation, and the Romans did undoubtedly
borrow all their philosophical principles from the Greeks. Their
originality _there_, as is well said by a remarkable writer in the most
remarkable of his works,[1] consisted in taking these principles _au
serieux_. They _did_ what the others talked about. Zeno, indeed, was not
a Roman; but Poetus Thrasea and Marcus Antoninus were.

[1] Mr. Maurice, in the essay on the history of moral speculation and
culture, which forms the article "Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy"
in the _Encyclopaedia Metropolitana._

JOHN STERLING ON CARLYLE

[From _London and Westminster Review_ October, 1839]

All countries at all times require, and England perhaps at the present
not less than others, men having a faith at once distinct and