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He added, with a sigh, "Our lies are as inferior to the lies of the ancients as our statues, and for the same reason; we do not study nature as they did. We are imitatores, servum pecus. Believe you 'the lives of the saints; that Paul the Theban was the first hermit, and Anthony the first Caenobite? Why, Pythagoras was an Eremite, and under ground for seven years; and his daughter was an abbess.
We have already seen, however, the Greys, Hollands, and Broughams, the fathers and most eloquent apostles of Reform, dethroned by a clique of large talkers about great principles, with a comparatively small stock of ideas to do business on, such as Mr appropriation Ward, the Tom Duncombes, Villierses, &c., men vastly inferior in talents and attainments, after all, to the Gironde, of whom they are the imitatores servum pecus; whilst these again "give place" on the pressure from without of the one-idea endowed tribe of Repealers of Unions and Corn-Laws the practical men of the Mountain genus the O'Connells, Cobdens, and Brights, who, not yet so fierce as their predecessors of the Robespierre and Clootz dynasty, are so far content with patronising the "strap and billy roller" in factories, instead of carting aristocrats to the guillotine, which may come hereafter, if, as they say, appetites grow with what they feed on.
This custom was not thought to detract from the writer's independence, inasmuch as each had his own domain, and borrowed only where he would be equally ready to give. It was otherwise with those thriftless bards so roughly dealt with by Horace in his nineteenth Epistle "O imitatores, servum pecus! ut mihi saepe Bilem, saepe iocum movistis." the Baviad and Maeviad of the Roman poet-world.
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