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Idylls of Theocritus (270 B. c.). One is at first surprised to find the appearance of the bucolic or pastoral poetry, só late in comparison with the heroic, the lyrical, and the dramatic. As it seems to paint a primitive period of human nature, we are led to think that it would be one of the first forms in which poetry would appear. The truth is, however, that it has generally made its appearance, and has always been most popular, in ages of great social refinement, when excess of luxury in the life of cities drives the mind back upon the supposed simplicity of rural life and its occupations. Such was the case with the Greek Idylls of Theocritus, with the Bucolics of Virgil; with the pastoral dramas of Tasso, Guarini, and Bonarelli ; and with the pastorals of Pope and Phillips. They are all the growth of a period of great literary refinement. Frederick Schlegel observes justly, however, that there is an essential error in isolating pastoral poetry, as is generally done, and viewing the country life abstracted from its due situation in that picture of the world and of human life which it is the province of poetry to unfold. "Let us reflect for a moment on those passages in the heroic poems of antiquity, or in the chivalric romances of the moderns, which afford us glimpses of the simplicity and repose of rural manners. Their simplicity appears still more innocent, and their repose still more peaceful, from the situation in which they are placed in the midst of the guilty tumult of wars, and the fierce passions of heHere everything appears in its true and natural connexion, and the poetry is as varied as the world and the men which it professes to represent." It is certain that this treatment of the rural life as a department of life, by narrowing within the most confined limits the materials of the poet, is the cause of that monotony which is generally found to per

roes.

vade pastoral poetry. Nothing, in fact, becomes more wearisome than the repetition of Arcadian descriptions of the golden age,

Lactis uberes

Cantare rivos atque truncis
Lapsa cavis iterare mella.

But this fault is more prominent amongst the modern, particularly the Italian pastoral writings, than in Theocritus, who has in general painted his shepherds and peasants with a natural and manly simplicity, approaching even, as it seems to modern ideas, to coarseness. His Idylls, as indeed the name implies, are little poetical pictures or representations in miniature, sometimes of mythological subjects, at other times of matters of common life, but almost always amatory in their purpose and termination. With Theocritus may be classed, though far inferior to him in vigour, the "showy Bion and the delicate Moschus," the last names of any note which precede that period of exhaustion, when, the days of high imagination and great works being over, those of mere cleverness and neatness of execution, of slender trifles, epigrams, and anthologies, commenced.

LATIN POETRY.

BUT as the genius of one nation, yielding to the force of circumstances, declines, nature seems to provide a principle of compensation in the development of that of another. The course of literature and poetry appears to resemble an arctic summer, in which the sun scarcely dips in one quarter of the horizon before he re-appears in another. While the creative energies of Greece either sink into barrenness or expand into a rank and unwholesome luxuriance, as her morals are corrupted, and her liberties impaired and at last extinguished, we perceive in the Italian peninsula the rise of a national character and a literature, destined, alike in arts and arms, in polity or in literature, to give laws to the world.

Yet Italy, free and independent as she was, and animated by a consciousness of national pride and growing power, exhibits during the first five centuries of her history (735 B. C. to 253 B. C.) a mere blank, so far as poetry is concerned. That she may have possessed legendary ballads founded on those various mythic or semi-historical traditions which were afterwards interwoven by Livy into his history of Rome, is not improbable; but of the nature of these we know nothing, of their existence at all we have no certain traces; and nothing can be more fanciful than the extent to which Niebuhr, Schlegel, and other German writers have carried their conjectures on this subject,

In fact, we know nothing of Roman poetry prior to the introduction of the Greek language and literature, through the conquest of Tarentum (272 B. c.) and Magna Græcia ; soon after which the rude attempts of a Greek slave, Livius Andronicus, to translate the Odyssey of Homer into Latin (240 B. c.), first gave the victors some idea of the poetical treasures of that nation, to which, though victors in the field of warfare, the Romans felt their inferiority in the more peaceful domain of literature. His preferring the wilder and more homely of Homer's poems to his more imposing, elaborate, and dignified performance, only showed that he rightly apprehended the tendencies of an infant taste. Children as they were in poetry, the power of the marvellous had attractions for the Romans, which that of simple yet heroic truth would probably not have possessed. The efforts of Andronicus to diffuse a taste for Greek literature did not stop here; for he was the translator also of several specimens both of the tragic and the comic drama of Greece.

He was succeeded by a Roman poet of original though coarse and unequal genius, Ennius (239 B. c.). Yet, with strong originality of mind, he was a worshipper of Greek literature; and his influence on his successors is probably owing in a higher degree to what he transplanted from the soil of Greece, than what he reared from the independent stores of his mind. He attempted by turns, epic, tragic, satiric, epigrammatic, didactic, and even acrostic poetry. He versified the Roman Historical Chronicles, a poem of which few specimens survive, but these calculated to excite much regret that a work, executed with so much force and feeling in parts, should have been irrecoverably consigned to oblivion. His vigorous and forcible style, with all its rudeness, conceits, and ridiculous jingles, appears in

its better parts to have possessed great charms for the best judges of diction at an after period; for we find that Virgil, Lucretius, and Ovid, and particularly the first, have availed themselves most liberally, not only of the ideas, but of the precise expressions, and frequently whole lines, of Ennius; while Horace, who seems to have had a warm feeling of the poetical fire that lay under the rude crust of the verses of Ennius, after citing two of his lines, says that the "disjecta membra poetæ would appear visible," however their arrangement might be transposed; a result which, he fairly admits, would not be the case with regard either to the satirical works of Lucilius or his own.

Neither in Ennius, however, nor in his dramatic successors, Plautus (died 184 B. c.) or Terence (born 195, died 159 B. c.), do we meet with much that is truly national. In all we are in fact perusing Greek compositions in Roman forms; for the plays of Plautus and Terence present to us, not the aspect of Roman life, but the state of Greek society, pretty much as it had appeared in the days of Menander. In the former we perceive more vigour, more variety, broader humour, but at the same time more coarseness; in the latter a limited invention, and characters reducing themselves to a few limited classes, generally an over-indulgent father, a profligate son, a rapacious mistress, and a knavish slave; to which Plautus is fond of adding some Bobadil or parasite, by way of relief. Yet in Terence's case we perceive the traces of genius, notwithstanding the close imitation by which he is fettered. His characters have a truthful air, his dialogue is always free from af

1 Dunlop, History of Roman Literature, vol. i. p. 21.

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