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If in this sense, also, I put anything romantic before you, pray pay no attention to me. But in the third and last place. The real and proper use of the word romantic is simply to characterize an improbable or unaccustomed degree of beauty, sublimity, or virtue. For instance, in matters of history, is not the Retreat of the Ten Thousand romantic? Is not the death of Leonidas? of the Horatii?
A sister of the Horatii was the affianced bride of one of the Curiatii, and as she saw her victorious brother enter the city, bearing on his shoulders the military cloak which she had wrought for her lover with her own hands, she broke into wild invectives, tearing her hair, and upbraiding her brother with bitter words.
Moreover, the poet, not satisfied with making, as the history does, one sister of the Horatii in love with one of the Curiatii, has thought proper to invent the marriage of a sister of the Curiatii with one of the Horatii: and as in the former the love of country yields to personal inclination, in the latter personal inclination yields to love of country.
But during the reigns of the pagan emperors it was not safe in Rome to insinuate publicly any disbelief in such honoured legends as those of the wolf that suckled the foundlings; the ascent of Romulus into heaven; the nymph Egeria; the duel of the Horatii and Curiatii; the leaping of Curtius into the gulf on his horse; the cutting of a flint with a razor by Tarquin; the Sibyl and her books.
The third of the Horatii affected to fly, and was pursued by the Curiatii, but as they were wounded, the third Roman subdued them in detail, and so the Albans became subjects of the Romans. The conqueror met his sister at one of the gates, who, being betrothed to one of the Curiatii, reproached him for the death of her lover, which so incensed him that he slew her.
This terrible tragedy, which terminated the independent existence of the Alban power, took place in the fields around here; and on the right-hand side of the road are three huge circular mounds, overgrown with long rich grass, planted with tall cypress and ilex trees, and surrounded at the foot with a wall of huge peperino blocks, which antiquarians have determined to be the tombs of the five slaughtered combatants the farther mound being that of the two Horatii, the second that of one of the Curiatii, and the third that of the other two Curiatii.
Of his style the most perfect criticism was given in the next generation by a single phrase, Horatii curiosa felicitas, of no poet can it be more truly said, in the phrase of the Greek dramatist Agathon, that "skill has an affection for luck and luck for skill." His poetry supplies more phrases which have become proverbial than the rest of Latin literature put together.
His art developed and grew systematized under the Republic and the Empire; but Napoleon, whose genius crystallized the elements of everything in all fields of intellectual effort with which he occupied himself, did little but formally "consecrate," in French phrase, the art of the painter of "The Oath of the Horatii" and the originator and designer of the "Fête" of Robespierre's "Être Suprême."
It was no longer a time when the fate of a people could be placed in the hands of a few valiant warriors, such as the three Horatii and the three Curiatii, or the thirty Bretons and thirty English.
He, the father, had discovered in Leipsic what his son had sought in vain at all the most famous Universities of Italy, and if he should succeed in one remaining step, the fame of the Ueberhells, like that of the Roman Horatii, would reach to the skies.
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