rks on men of celebrity
in various departments. He was a man of fair position, deriving his
income from a business in which he did nothing, at leisure to frequent
clubs and at ease in giving dinners; well-looking, polite, and generally
acceptable in society as a part of what we may call its bread-crumb--the
neutral basis needful for the plums and spice. Why, then, did he speak
of the modern Maro or the modern Flaccus with a peculiarity in his tone
of assent to other people's praise which might almost have led you to
suppose that the eminent poet had borrowed money of him and showed an
indisposition to repay? He had no criticism to offer, no sign of
objection more specific than a slight cough, a scarcely perceptible
pause before assenting, and an air of self-control in his utterance--as
if certain considerations had determined him not to inform against the
so-called poet, who to his knowledge was a mere versifier. If you had
questioned him closely, he would perhaps have confessed that he did
think something better might be done in the way of Eclogues and
Georgics, or of Odes and Epodes, and that to his mind poetry was
something very different from what had hitherto been known under that
name.

For my own part, being of a superstitious nature, given readily to
imagine alarming causes, I immediately, on first getting these mystic
hints from Lentulus, concluded that he held a number of entirely
original poems, or at the very least a revolutionary treatise on
poetics, in that melancholy manuscript state to which works excelling
all that is ever printed are necessarily condemned; and I was long timid
in speaking of the poets when he was present. For what might not
Lentulus have done, or be profoundly aware of, that would make my
ignorant impressions ridiculous? One cannot well be sure of the negative
in such a case, except through certain positives that bear witness to
it; and those witnesses are not always to be got hold of. But time
wearing on, I perceived that the attitude of Lentulus towards the
philosophers was essentially the same as his attitude towards the poets;
nay, there was something so much more decided in his mode of closing his
mouth after brief speech on the former, there was such an air of rapt
consciousness in his private hints as to his conviction that all
thinking hitherto had been an elaborate mistake, and as to his own
power of conceiving a sound basis for a lasting superstructure, that I
began to belie