priceless document as a model of the purest Latin idiom in the precise
age of its perfection. It follows from this that in certain points of
technique Lucretius kept behind his age, or rather, deliberately held
aloof from the movement of his age towards a more intricate and elaborate
art. The wave of Alexandrianism only touched him distantly; he takes up
the Ennian tradition where Ennius had left it, and puts into it the
immensely increased faculty of trained expression which a century of
continuous literary practice, and his own admirably clear and quick
intelligence, enable him to supply. The only Greek poets mentioned by him
are Homer and Empedocles. His remoteness from the main current of
contemporary literature is curiously parallel to that of Milton. The
Epicurean philosophy was at this time, as it never was either earlier or
later, the predominant creed among the ruling class at Rome: but except
in so far as its shallower aspects gave the motive for light verse, it
was as remote from poetry as the Puritan theology of the seventeenth
century. In both cases a single poet of immense genius was also deeply
penetrated with the spirit of a creed. In both cases his poetical
affinity was with the poets of an earlier day, and his poetical manner
something absolutely peculiar to himself. Both of them under this
strangely mixed impulse set themselves to embody their creed in a great
work of art. But the art did not appeal strongly to sectaries, nor the
creed to artists. The _De Rerum Natura_ and the _Paradise Lost_, while
they exercised a profound influence over later poets, came silently into
the world, and seem to have passed over the heads of their immediate
contemporaries. There is yet another point of curious resemblance between
them. Every student of Milton knows that the only English poet from whom
he systematically borrowed matter and phrase was a second-rate translator
of a second-rate original, who now would be almost forgotten but for the
use Milton made of him. For one imitation of Spenser or Shakespeare in
the _Paradise Lost_ it would be easy to adduce ten--not mere coincidences