the Ennianists, but the younger
and bolder men went much farther and ventured already--though only as yet
in heretical revolt against literary orthodoxy--to call Plautus
a rude jester and Lucilius a bad verse-smith. This modern tendency
attached itself not to the native authorship, but rather
to the more recent Greek literature or the so-called Alexandrinism.

The Greek Alexandrinism

We cannot avoid saying at least so much respecting
this remarkable winter-garden of Hellenic language and art,
as is requisite for the understanding of the Roman literature
of this and the later epochs. The Alexandrian literature was based
on the decline of the pure Hellenic idiom, which from the time
of Alexander the Great was superseded in daily life by an inferior
jargon deriving its origin from the contact of the Macedonian dialect
with various Greek and barbarian tribes; or, to speak more accurately,
the Alexandrian literature sprang out of the ruin of the Hellenic nation
generally, which had to perish, and did perish, in its national
individuality in order to establish the universal monarchy of Alexander
and the empire of Hellenism. Had Alexander's universal empire continued
to subsist, the former national and popular literature would have been
succeeded by a cosmopolitan literature Hellenic merely in name,
essentially denationalized and called into life in a certain measure
by royal patronage, but at all events ruling the world;
but, as the state of Alexander was unhinged by his death,
the germs of the literature corresponding to it rapidly perished.
Nevertheless the Greek nation with all that it had possessed--
with its nationality, its language, its art--belonged to the past.
It was only in a comparatively narrow circle not of men of culture--
for such, strictly speaking, no longer existed--but of men of erudition
that the Greek literature was still cherished even when dead;
that the rich inheritance which it had left was inventoried
with melancholy pleasure or arid refinement of research; and that,
possibly, the living sense of sympathy or the dead erudition
was elevated into a semblance of productiveness. This posthumous
productiveness constitutes the so-called Alexandrinism.
It is essentially similar to that literature of scholars, which,
keeping aloof from the living Romanic nationalities and their vulgar
idioms, grew up during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
among a cosmopolitan circle of erudite philologues--as