perament of Lucretius would feel this; and from his seclusion would look out on politics, not, perhaps, with much foresight, or with defined anxieties; but with vague uneasiness for an order of things dear and venerable to him, and with nervous dependence on those whom he believed able to save it. At the beginning of the De Rerum Natura1 he speaks of himself as writing 'patriai tempore iniquo,' and amid troubles which hindered him from working with a quiet mind. This solicitude for the republic is thrice marked in Mr. Tennyson's poem: in the dream, springing from a boyish memory of Sulla's massacres nearly thirty years before; in the prayer of Venus to restrain Mars from bloodshed; and very finely in the passage where the spirit of Lucretius rises against the thought that the senses should enslave him,-namesake of her whose blood was given for Roman honour :

And from it sprang the Commonwealth, which breaks

As I am breaking now!

Anxiety for his country was one of the troubles for which Lucretius found some solace in his Epicurean creed. The religion of equanimity had a sort of prescriptive right to console political despair; in its youth it had been the popular creed at Athens in the days of vassalage to Macedon; and now it was popular with intelligent men in the days when the Roman republic was seen to be breaking up. At a time when men felt that public affairs were in a thoroughly bad state, and that they were powerless to mend it, when they could not see that any career of high activity was open to them, or that they could possibly influence the largest interests of society, they felt the attraction of a philosophy which said of such evils, first, that they could not be helped; and next, that they did not greatly matter. But Lucretius approached Epicureanism in another spirit, and held it with a very different grasp, from the

1 Lucr. i. 41.

weary public men or men of society who accepted it as a refuge from praetical life. He held it because he believed devoutly that Epicurus had really solved the problem of life; his faith rested primarily on a scientific basis; for him, it was accident,-tending, no doubt, to deepen his conviction, but still an accident, that this faith supplied the kind of fortitude specially needed in his own day. Earnestness and honesty were not, however, the only qualities which distinguished the philosophy of Lucretius from much that passed under the same name. In teaching or hinting the art, so important to the higher Epicureanism, of drawing pleasure from simple things, it had a peculiar and wonderful charm, due to a special characteristic of Lucretius, a characteristic rather rare in antiquity; his feeling for the life and beauty of nature. This sense in him had many moods: sometimes it is roused into sonorous verse by sights of grandeur or terror, by storm or volcano; sometimes it is in sympathy with the farstretching silence of Italian uplands, the 'otia dia pastorum ;' but especially it delights in the happy animation of fields and woods, in the exuberant life of creatures who enjoy the present, and have no care for the future. There is a peculiar buoyancy and blitheness in the rhythm of Lucretius when he speaks of such things; a tone different enough from the mournful majesty of the cadences which unfold his main argument, his protest against the fear of death, against the hope of a life to

come.

The brisk, joyous movement of these occasional passages is very happily caught in Mr. Tennyson's lines, where Lucretius speaks of the time

when light is large and lambs are glad, Nosing the mother's udder, and the bird

Makes his heart voice amid a blaze of flowers.

This instinct of sympathy with the aspects of external nature, this power of being stirred, soothed, or gladdened by them, was especially Italian.

A

Greek, of course, was keenly alive to outward impressions; but his feeling for nature was sensuous, not ideal; he

enjoyed spring or summer because it was cheerful, and stimulated his sense of life; not because it was beautiful, and set him thinking about its own life. A grave, meditative pleasure in scenery, or in common country sights and sounds, came more easily to the Italian, by instinct a farmer, not a man of cities; and where the capacity for this pleasure was large and free, it might evidently give a calmer, more independent contentedness than any round of artificial pastimes, however refined, which the Greek Epicurean could devise. Epicureanism was a Greek product, matured and long monopolised by Greeks; but the highest form of it historically known to us, the phase shewn in the De Rerum Natura, grew out of the Italian character.

One reason, perhaps, why this feeling towards nature had comparatively slight hold upon the ancients generally, was this polytheism had a strong hold upon them, from which even the sceptics did not escape; and polytheism meant the analysing of nature into a number of persons, each ministrant to a separate province of human needs and wishes. The sympathy of nature with man was, as it were, drawn off into the gods; the moods of the sea became the humours of Poseidon; the way in which mountain solitudes affected the imagination was by suggesting Pan and the Ŏreads. This fact, of course, goes only a little way towards explaining the difference between the ancient and the modern feeling for scenery; a difference due, more perhaps than to any other single cause, to medieval thought having been so long steeped in a tender, melancholy religious sentiment, favourable to reverie. But, in so far as the impulse to meditate on natural beauty was felt in pagan antiquity, the presence of the gods must have tended to thwart it; their forms must have intercepted and distracted the gaze. There is a vivid, easilystartled fancy to which forest silence or the air of the hills seems to tremble with a mystery of haunting deities; that Greek fancy which thrilled with a presage of apparition on the island shore where dance-loving Pan walks

6

beside the waves,' or in the shadows of the grotto on the Delphian steep,

κοίλη, φίλορνις, δαιμόνων ἀναστροφή Beneath whose wing-swept dome immortals stray:

but it is very different from the grave imagination which enters into the secret

meaning of beautiful places, which likes to pause and rest upon them, penetrated with their charm, and moved by it to an indefinable yearning which seems half regret, half hope, a mood which can almost yield, as to music,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair. Now, it was in this earnest, thoughtful way that Lucretius was accustomed to regard nature; and it seems singular and distinctive of him, that in a temperament so grave, so averse from mere aesthetic dreaming, so unused to a play of sensuous fancy, there should at the same time have lived a feeling, vivid, flexible, artistic, for the Greek poetry of the gods. He rejected the myths that spoke of them; but no one understood the spirit of the myths better, to no one were their outlines clearer. Take, for instance, the passage about Mars in the invocation of Venus,

In gremium qui saepe tuum se Peicit, aeterno devictus vulnere amoris, Atque ita suspiciens tereti cervice reposta Pascit amore avidos inhians in te, dea, visus, Eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore : :1 this picture has nothing of the woodenness, the pompous conventionality, into which most of the Latin poets (with the signal exception of Catullus) are apt to fall, when they deal with the commonplaces of the popular faith; as far as the thought is concerned, it might have come from a Greek of the time of Pericles, to whom the gods were very real persons; whose idea of them was in harmony with all the beauty of form, and bright with the glow, amid which he lived. Again, in the passage where Lucretius describes the Phrygian pageant of Cybele,-though the Roman sympathy with pomp, the triumphal instinct, is perhaps uppermost,-a true Greek feeling comes out, where it is

1 Lucr. i. 33 ff.

His golden feet on those empurpled stairs
That climb into the windy halls of heaven.

This image of the sun moving upward in his worshipped majesty has a specially Roman stateliness; the lines which follow touch a feeling, or rather the disappointment of a feeling, more distinctively Greek; they speak of the sun looking down with the same blank splendour on all phases of human hope or suffering, on the new-born, on old age and death; never sympathizing with what he sees, never pausing in his course,

-as Ajax in Sophocles asks him to pause, 'checking his golden rein' over Telamon's sorrow-stricken home in Salamis. As for the Epicurean gods,

who haunt

The lucid interspace of world and world,— tranquil, immortal, careless of men,Lucretius accepted the dogma of their existence as he found it in Epicurus: My master held That gods there are, since all men so believe. This is the only ground assigned by Lucretius himself for the belief; viz., that all men have seen, either in waking hours or (oftener) in dreams, forms of more than human stature, beauty, and might; and have rightly inferred the existence of beings, immortal, because for ever haunting men, and blessed, because greatly strong; though it was

1 Lucr. ii. 626.

wrong to infer that these beings trouble themselves about men.1 But Lucretius, like Epicurus, is silent on the difficulties of reconciling such a belief with the atomic theory. Did the gods exist from all eternity, or did they come into existence? Are they to exist for ever, or to pass away when the atoms, which have formed, shall dissolve all else that man knows of? There is, indeed, in the De Rerum Natura an unfulfilled promise to explain more fully the nature of the sphere in which these divine beings move; but the grand difficulty of their existence is never even touched. It is strange if Lucretius did not feel the difficulty,-if doubts and misgivings did not sometimes visit him; they may have been silenced, partly by loyalty to his master, partly by a poet's sympathy with the grandeur of immortal

sinecurism. It seems to us one of the finest touches in Mr. Tennyson's poem, that it represents these doubts as starting up just when the laws of the man's inner life have been unsettled, the old balance of his faculties disturbed. Anarchy begins to reign in the nature hitherto so strongly self-ruled; the faith which love and reverence for a great master had consecrated, and around which subtle fancies have long been suffered to twine, is rudely shaken; the intellect, at the very moment that it is tottering, and while but half conscious of its own treason, is insurgent :

The Gods! the Gods!
If all be atoms, how then should the Gods
Being atomic not be dissoluble,
Not follow the great law?

But, for Lucretius, the loss of this part of his faith was only a sentimental loss; it could not add to the reality of his anguish, or furnish a distinct motive for desiring death. He dies because he has lost the tranquil mind which alone, in his belief, can make life tolerable:

But now it seems some unseen monster lays
His vast and filthy hands upon my will,
Wrenching it backward into his, and spoils
My bliss in being.

The story of the madness and suicide of Lucretius comes to us from the fourth century A.D., on the authority of Jerome in the Eusebian Chronicle; but was probably current at least as early as the time of Suetonius, at the end of the first century. The De Rerum Natura is evidently an unfinished poem; on the other hand, Jerome's statement that it was composed per intervalla insaniae is scarcely credible. A more probable version of the story is that which Mr. Tennyson's poem implies, viz. that the slow workings of the poison did not become malignant until Lucretius had already brought his work nearly to the state in which we now possess it.

It would of course be idle to inquire whether the possible was the actual fate of Lucretius, or to expect more certainty

On

about his death than about his life. him, in the Latin poetry which owed him so much, no firelight of familiar allusion ever falls, no word, even, of more formal praise gives him companionship with the names of which Rome was proud; and after his death he is not heard of for four hundred years, until, in the twilight of an age shuddering with traditions of Satan's work among the heathen, a lurid flash of epitaph changes the darkness about his grave to horror. In reading the poem which has permanently enlarged the circle of those for whom Lucretius will have an interest, it is natural to think of another name alluded to there, to which another living English poet, Mr. Matthew Arnold, has drawn sympathy; the name of a man most unlike Lucretius in bent of genius, but like him in this, that his troubles, too, were of the intellect, and that he is said to have taken refuge from them in death. When Empedocles stood on Etna, on the brink of his fiery

grave, his thoughts were not those of Lucretius; no regret for vanishing conquests, no confusing torment of the senses, mingled with his clear-minded despair. He had never been very hopeful that the boundaries of man's intellectual domain could be pushed by his frontier-war with fate. And now, after the years which have slowly taught him what those limits indeed are,-how necessarily, in his own words of profound sadness, men live and die

αὐτὸ μόνον πεισθέντες ὅτῳ προσέκυρσαν ἕκαστος, sure of no more than each has stumbled on, he feels that the only crown which such with at least the desire for light uneffort as his can win is to quit the world quenched. What a contrast to this sense of baffled, hopeless struggle is the exulting confidence which speaks in the De Rerum Natura; the joy in the great victory of Epicurus, which brings us level with the sky; the sense of a new power wrested from the hands of fate; the assurance to the disciple that 'one thing after another will grow clear, and dark night shall not rob thee of the path, until thou survey the utmost ends of nature;'1 changing at last, in that dark hour of which we have been following the anguish, to an agony of defeat and abasement; to that cry which the bitter bondage of the senses wrings from the conqueror who had once mounted to the serene temples of the wise, What man,

What Roman, would be dragged in triumph thus?

Empedocles died because he could not find peace; Lucretius, because he had found and lost it.

1 Lucr. i. 1115 ff.

LUXOR, 3d February.

THERE is a man here from Girgeh who says he is married to a ginneeyeh (fairy) princess. I have asked to be introduced to her, but I suspect there will be some hitch about it. Do you remember Alexis saying to me, "Allez, madame, vous êtes trop incredule ?" The unintelligible thing is the motive which prompts wonders and miracles here, seeing that the wonder-workers do not get any money by it, and indeed very often give, like the Indian wélee I told you of, who gave me five dollars for the poor. His miracles were all gratis, which was the most miraculous thing of all in a saint. I am promised that the ginneeyeh shall come through the wall. If she should

do so, I should be compelled to believe in her, as there are no mechanical contrivances in Luxor. All the hareem believe it, and the man's human wife swears she waits on her like a slave, and backs her husband's lie or delu sion fully. I have not seen the man, but I should not wonder if it were a delusion. Real bona fide visions and revelations are so common, and I think there is but little downright imposture. Meanwhile familiarity breeds contempt; ginns, afreets, and shaitans inspire far less respect than the stupidest ghost at home, and the devil (Iblees) is reduced to deplorable insignificance. He is never mentioned in the pulpit or in religious conversation with the respect he enjoys in Christian countries. I suppose we may console ourselves with the hope that he will pay off the Muslims for their neglect of him, hereafter.

:

I cannot describe to you the misery here now-indeed it is wearisome even to think of every day some new tax. Now every beast-camel, cow, sheep, donkey, horse-is made to pay. The fellaheen can no longer eat bread; they

are living on barley-meal mixed with water, and raw green stuff-vetches, &c. which to people used to good food is terrible, and I see all my acquaintance growing seedy, and ragged, and anxious; the taxation makes life almost impossible: 100 piastres per feddan as tax on every crop, on every animal first, and then again when it is sold in the market, and a tax on every man, on charcoal, on butter, on salt. I wonder I am not tormented for money; but not above three people have tried to beg or borrow.

If

Thanks for the Westminster Epilogue: it always amuses me much. So Terence was a nigger! I would tell Rachmeh so if I could make him understand who Terence was, and that he-Rachmehstood in need of any encouragement; but the worthy fellow never imagines that his skin is in any way inferior to mine. There is no trace of the niggerboy in Terence's Davus. My niggerboy, Mabrook, has grown huge, and developed a voice of thunder; he is of the elephantine rather than the tiger species-a very wild young savage. he goes, I am tempted to take Yussuf's nice little Denka girl to replace him: but a girl is such an impossibility where there is no regular hareem. In the boat, Achmet is enough under Omar, but in this huge, dusty house, and with errands to run, and comers and goers to look after, pipes and coffee and the like, it takes two boys to be comfortable. It is surprising how fast these Arab boys learn, and how well they do their work. Achmet, who is quite little, would be a perfectly sufficient servant for a man alone. He can cook, wash, clean the rooms, make the beds, do all the table service, knife and plate cleaning, all very well. Mabrook is slower, but has the same merit our poor Hassan had