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Maurice Brotteaux occupied the right-hand corner of the topmost row, the place of honour. He was dressed in his plum-coloured surtout, which he had brushed very carefully the day before and mended at the pocket where his little Lucretius had ended by fretting a hole. Beside him sat the woman Rochemaure, painted and powdered and patched, a brilliant and ghastly figure.
The Epicureans, not being able to shut their eyes against this glaring difficulty, that strikes at the very foundation of their whole system, have, for a last shift, invented what Lucretius calls clinamen by which is meant a motion somewhat declining or bending from the straight line, and which gives atoms the occasion to meet and encounter.
He threatened, as I remember, that if she did not submit he would slay her, slay a slave and place him beside her and say he found him there. A poor device, it always seemed to me. If Mr. Lucretius had asked him how he came to be in his wife's bedroom overlooking her morals, what could he have said? But the point is Lucrese submitted, and Alima didn't.
This was a translation of the works of Horace, an author more diversified, and consequently more difficult than Lucretius. Some have insinuated, that Mr. Dryden, jealous of his rising fame, and willing to take advantage of his vanity, in order to sink his reputation, strenuously urged him to this undertaking, in which he was morally certain Creech could not succeed.
It may not seem as though Lucretius belonged among the friends of old Roman religion, and as though the De Rerum Natura were exactly a religious poem, and yet his work was in so far helpful to old Roman religion in that it attacked the excesses of a latter-day superstition which had alienated the hearts of the people from their old beliefs.
It was three days later, in the morning, that his captress said to the Magister Udal: 'Husband, it is time that I gave thee the bridal gift. The magister, happy with a bellyful of carp, bread and breakfast ale, muttered 'Anan? from above his copy of Lucretius. He sat in the window-seat of the great stone kitchen.
She fell back against the Venus, her sea-green dress rippling upon the white marble, and covered her eyes with her hands. When she looked again, Lucretius was gone. How terrible he had been to-day! Dream of the dead, he had said, the dead! And why had he talked of a hidden poison of which men might sicken and die?
The priest smiled and shook his head. "Bless you, no! My dear sir, there is nothing new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian theory more than two thousand years ago. As for this eponym thing, why Saint Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago.
Lucretius took no part whatever in public life; he could afford to be in earnest; he felt no shadow of responsibility for the welfare of the State as such.
Every one who has any sense of the close affinity between art and nationality will always turn back from Cicero and Horace to Cato and Lucretius; and nothing but the schoolmaster's view of history and of literature which has acquired, it is true, in this department the sanction of prescription could have called the epoch of art beginning with the new monarchy pre-eminently the golden age.
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