Smart or Cowper--in the lucid intervals of insanity? Did Cicero have
anything to do with the editing of the unfinished poem? If so, which
Cicero--Marcus or Quintus? and why, in either case, is there no record of
the fact in their correspondence, or in any writing of the period? All
these questions are probably insoluble, and the notice of Jerome leaves
the whole life and personality of the poet still completely hidden. Yet
we have little or nothing else to go upon. There is a brief and casual
allusion to him in one of Cicero's letters of the year 54 B.C.: yet it
speaks of "poems," not the single great poem which we know; and most
editors agree that the text of the passage is corrupt, and must be
amended by the insertion of a _non_, though they differ on the important
detail of the particular clause in which it should be inserted. That the
earlier Augustan poets should leave their great predecessor completely
unnoticed is less remarkable, for it may be taken as merely a part of
that curious conspiracy of silence regarding the writers of the
Ciceronian age which, whether under political pressure or not, they all
adopted. Even Ovid, never ungenerous though not always discriminating in
his praise, dismisses him in a list of Latin poets with a single couplet
of vague eulogy. In the reactionary circles of the Empire, Lucretius
found recognition; but the critics who, according to Tacitus, ranked him
above Virgil may be reasonably suspected of doing so more from caprice
than from rational conviction. Had the poem itself perished (and all the
extant manuscripts are copies of a single original), no one would have
thought that such a preference could be anything but a piece of
antiquarian pedantry, like the revival, in the same period, of the plays
of the early tragedians. But the fortunate and slender chance which has
preserved it shows that their opinion, whether right or wrong, is one
which at all events is neither absurd nor unarguable. For in the _De
Rerum Natura_ we are brought face to face not only with an extraordinary
literary achievement, but with a mind whose profound and brilliant genius