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It follows that the Romans, at least, must have been haunted by a constant dread of judgment to come, from which, but for the testimony of Lucretius and his manifest sincerity, we might have believed them free. Perhaps we may regret the existence of this Roman religion, for it did its best to ruin a great poet.
For, of old, to supply the absence of the Kings, and afterwards of the Consuls, that the city might not remain without a ruler, a temporary Magistrate was appointed to administer justice, and watch over exigencies: and it is said that by Romulus was deputed Denter Romulius; Numa Marcius, by Tullus Hostilius; and by Tarquin the Proud, Spurius Lucretius.
I also remember having heard Carducci say, in his lectures at the University of Bologna, that the later development of the forms and the substance of literature is often merely the reproduction of the forms and the substance of the primitive Græco-Oriental literature; in the same way, the modern scientific theory of monism, the very soul of universal evolution and the typical and definitive form of systematic, scientific, experiential human thought boldly fronting the facts of the external world following upon the brilliant but erratic speculations of metaphysics is only a return to the ideas of the Greek philosophers and of Lucretius, the great poet of naturalism.
If we look into the Latin Writers, we find none of this mixt Wit in Virgil, Lucretius, or Catullus; very little in Horace, but a great deal of it in Ovid, and scarce any thing else in Martial. Out of the innumerable Branches of mixt Wit, I shall choose one Instance which may be met with in all the Writers of this Class.
We can hardly err in tracing this awakened earnestness and its direction upon the Epicurean system to his first acquaintance with the poem of Lucretius. The enthusiasm for philosophy expressed in these lines remained with Virgil all his life. Poet as he was, he would at once be drawn to the theory of the universe so eloquently propounded by a brother-poet.
There is a famous passage in Lucretius, in which he speaks of the joy of the mariner who has escaped to dry land, when he sees his shipwrecked companions still struggling in the waves.
To the Epicureans, indeed, as to all ancient thinkers, the scientific method as it is now understood was unknown; and a series of unverified generalizations, however brilliant and acute, is not the true way towards knowledge. But it still remains an astonishing fact that many of the most important physical discoveries of modern times are hinted at or even expressly stated by Lucretius.
As I do not see any reason to give a different character of my illustrious friend now, from what I formerly gave, the greatest part of the sketch of him in my Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, is here adopted. See ante, i. 41. For his fox-hunting see ante, i. 446, note I. Lucretius, i. 72. See ante, i. 406.
His great facility and formal polish made him successful in producing a much more finished and harmonious cadence than had before been attained. Coming between Ennius and Lucretius, and evidently studied by the latter, he is an important link in metrical development.
Lucretius attributes to accident the discovery of the fusion of the metals; a person in touching a shell-fish observes that it emits a purple liquid as a dye, hence the Tyrian purple; clay is observed to harden in the fire, and hence the invention of bricks, which could hardly fail ultimately to lead to the discovery of porcelain; oven glass, the most perfect and beautiful of those manufactures you call chemical, is said to have been discovered by accident; Theophrastus states that some merchants who were cooking on lumps of soda or natron, near the mouth of the river Belus, observed that a hard and vitreous substance was formed where the fused natron ran into the sand.
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