has only of late years, and with the modern advance of physical and
historical science, been adequately recognised.

The earliest Greek impulse in Latin poetry had long been exhausted; and
the fashion among the new generation was to admire and study beyond all
else the Greek poets of the decadence, who are generally, and without any
substantial injustice, lumped together by the name of the Alexandrian
school. The common quality in all this poetry was its great learning, and
its remoteness from nature. It was poetry written in a library; it viewed
the world through a highly coloured medium of literary and artistic
tradition. The laborious perfectness of execution which the taste of the
time demanded was, as a rule, lavished on little subjects, patient
carvings in ivory. One side of the Alexandrian school which was largely
followed was that of the didactic poets--Aratus, Nicander, Euphorion, and
a host of others less celebrated. Cicero, in mature life, speaks with
some contempt of the taste for Euphorion among his contemporaries. But he
had himself, as a young man, followed the fashion, and translated the
_Phaenomena_ of Aratus into wonderfully polished and melodious hexameter
verse.

Not unaffected by this fashion of the day, but turning from it to older
and nobler models--Homer and Empedocles in Greek, Ennius in Latin--
Lucretius conceived the imposing scheme of a didactic poem dealing with
the whole field of life and nature as interpreted by the Epicurean
philosophy. He lived to carry out his work almost to completion. It here
and there wants the final touches of arrangement; one or two discussions
are promised and not given; some paragraphs are repeated, and others have
not been worked into their proper place; but substantially, as in the
case of the _Aeneid_, we have the complete poem before us, and know
perfectly within what limits it might have been altered or improved by