survival of the fashions of an earlier age, are of any account for their
own sake. Prose and poetry stood at the two opposite poles of their
cycle; and thus it is that, while the poets and prose-writers of the
Ciceronian age are equally imperishable in fame, the latter but represent
the culmination of a broad and harmonious development, while of the
former, amidst but apart from the beginnings of a new literary era, there
shine, splendid like stars out of the darkness, the two immortal lights
of Lucretius and Catullus.




IV.

LUCRETIUS.


The age of Cicero, a term familiar to all readers as indicating one of
the culminating periods of literary history, while its central and later
years are accurately fixed, may be dated in its commencement from varying
limits. Cicero was born in 106 B.C., the year of the final conquest of
Jugurtha, and the year before the terrible Cimbrian disaster at Orange:
he perished in the proscription of the triumvirate in December, 43 B.C.
His first appearance in public life was during the dictatorship of Sulla;
and either from this date, or from one ten years later when the Sullan
constitution was re-established in a modified form by Pompeius and
Crassus in their first consulate, the Ciceronian age extends over a space
which approximates in the one case to thirty, in the other to forty
years. No period in ancient, and few even in more modern history are so
pregnant with interest or so fully and intimately known. From the