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In lieu of this he offered half the English profits, and brought out the Reminiscences, "Jane Welsh Carlyle" being among them. They were eagerly read, not merely by all lovers of good literature, but by all lovers of gossip, good or bad. Carlyle's pen, like Dante's, "bit into the live man's flesh for parchment." He had a Tacitean power of drawing a portrait with a phrase which haunted the memory.
I found myself greatly admiring and even touched with envy. I wondered whether, in similar circumstances, I should have been able to resist the temptation to be Tacitean. One felt instinctively that Lord Salisbury must have been grateful to have such an instrument for dealing with a situation so delicate and so intricate and placing so great a responsibility on the man in charge.
But it seems rather, as Or. and Doed. explain it, to imply nearness and familiarity to the mind of the author and his readers: these well known songs. So 20: in haec corpora, quae miramur. Quoque, like quidem, follows the emphatic word in a clause, H. 602, III. 1; Z. 355. Relatu, called cantus trux, H. 2, 22. A Tacitean word. Freund. Cf. Baritum. Al. barditum and barritum.
The pictures drawn of the Empire by the historian and the satirist are in such striking accordance that they create a greater plausibility for the common view they hold than could be given by any single representation; and while Juvenal lends additional weight and colour to the Tacitean presentment of the imperial legend, he acquires from it in return an importance which could hardly otherwise have been sustained by his exaggerated and glaring rhetoric.
When Marsyas was 'torn from the scabbard of his limbs' della vagina della membre sue, to use one of Dante's most terrible Tacitean phrases he had no more song, the Greek said. Apollo had been victor. The lyre had vanquished the reed. But perhaps the Greeks were mistaken. I hear in much modern Art the cry of Marsyas. It is bitter in Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in Lamartine, mystic in Verlaine.
So monstratus, G. 31, which, Freund says, is Tacitean. The perf. part. pass. with negative prefix in often takes this sense. Cf. note, His. 5, 7: inexhaustum. Octavus annus. This was Agricola's seventh summer in Britain. See note 29: initio aestatis. But it being now later in the season, than when he entered Britain, he was now entering on his eighth year. Cf. Rit. in loc. Virtute Romani.
The truth expressed in that dictum of the pseudo-Demetrius quoted above as to the illuminative power of letters on character could be missed by no historian and by no biographer who had his wits about him even if he had less striking examples at hand than that letter of the Emperor Tiberius to the Senate which is one of the Tacitean flashes of lightning through the dark of history.
The frequenters of the Club were mostly drunkards, derelicts, crooks, or faddist not worth catching. Arriages began to arrive on the scene. That of Don Francesco drove up first of all. He stepped out and sailed across the piazza like a schooner before the wind. But his discourse, usually ample and florid as befitted both his person and his calling, was couched on this occasion in Tacitean brevity.
Neither of them spoke, until the Viceroy, after looking at him steadily for some minutes, said to me, "He is drunk; take him away." I did so, and so ended my visit without making any report. Wonderfully Tacitean is a later comment of the Pasha an Armenian by birth. He told Senior that the Pasha could never forget or forgive that he had seen his master in the day of his humiliation.
The fifteen silent years of Tacitus followed the publication of the dialogue on oratory. In the Agricola and Germania the distinctively Tacitean style is still immature, though it is well on the way towards maturity.
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