age after the manner of a commonplace-book, but displays
itself in his Satires in all its direct fulness and freshness.
Varro was in the best and fullest sense of the term a local antiquarian,
who from the personal observation of many years knew his nation
in its former idiosyncrasy and seclusion as well as in its modern state
of transition and dispersion, and had supplemented and deepened
his direct knowledge of the national manners and national language
by the most comprehensive research in historical and literary archives.
His partial deficiency in rational judgment and learning--
in our sense of the words--was compensated for by his clear
intuition and the poetry which lived within him. He sought
neither after antiquarian notices nor after rare antiquated
or poetical words;(25) but he was himself an old and old-fashioned man
and almost a rustic, the classics of his nation were his favourite
and long-familiar companions; how could it fail that many details
of the manners of his forefathers, which he loved above all
and especially knew, should be narrated in his writings, and that
his discourse should abound with proverbial Greek and Latin phrases,
with good old words preserved in the Sabine conversational language,
with reminiscences of Ennius, Lucilius, and above all of Plautus?
We should not judge as to the prose style of these aesthetic
writings of Varro's earlier period by the standard of his work
on Language written in his old age and probably published
in an unfinished state, in which certainly the clauses
of the sentence are arranged on the thread of the relative
like thrushes on a string; but we have already observed that Varro
rejected on principle the effort after a chaste style and Attic periods,
and his aesthetic essays, while destitute of the mean bombast
and the spurious tinsel of vulgarism, were yet written after an unclassic
and even slovenly fashion, in sentences rather directly joined
on to each other than regularly subdivided. The poetical pieces
inserted on the other hand show not merely that their author
knew how to mould the most varied measures with as much mastery
as any of the fashionable poets, but that he had a right
to include himself among those to whom a god has granted the gift
of "banishing cares from the heart by song and sacred poesy."(26)
the sketches of Varro no more created a school than the didactic poem
of Lucretius; to the more general causes which prevented this
there falls