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Hunt's view is, in this as in other subtle respects, nearer the truth than Moore's; for with all Byron's insight into Italian vice, he hated more the master vice of England hypocrisy; and much of his greatest, and in a sense latest, because unfinished work, is the severest, as it might be the wholesomest, satire ever directed against a great nation since the days of Juvenal and Tacitus.
By Tacitus it appeareth, that he was called to be partener in the gouernment of things in Britaine with Claudius, and had such successe, as it appéered to what estate of honour he was predestinate, hauing conquered nations, and taken kings prisoners.
The case, then, stands thus with respect to the MSS.; no MS. of the works of Tacitus, whose existence can be traced back further than the sixteenth century, contains the whole of the Annals; and no MS. of the works of Tacitus, whose existence can be traced back further than the first half of the preceding century, has the closing books of the Annals.
The New Testament was as little known as the lost books of Tacitus all that the people knew of the Gospels and the Epistles were the passages on which theologians had built up the Catholic formulas.
It seemed to them both that they had lived almost all their lives in war. Even Jeb Stuart's ball, stopped by the opening guns of a great battle, was far, far away, and to Harry, it was at least a century since he had closed his Tacitus in the Pendleton Academy, and put it away in his desk.
Except in one department, Carlyle's college curriculum was not remarkable. In "the classical field" he describes himself "truly as nothing," and learned to read Homer in the original with difficulty. He preferred Homer and Æschylus to all other classical authors, found Tacitus and Virgil "really interesting," Horace "egotistical, leichtfertig," and Cicero "a windy person, and a weariness."
In this way the first men of the pagan peoples, as children of the growing human race, fashioned things out of their ideas.... This nature of human things has bequeathed that eternal property which Tacitus elucidated with a fine phrase when he said, not without reason, that men in their terror fingunt simul creduntque."
Notwithstanding it is probable that Tacitus was born some years before the fire of Rome, he could derive only from reading and conversation the knowledge of an event which happened during his infancy.
This itself was art, art in the highest and most enduring form, and will live when marbles moulder away. Virgil, Cicero, Horace, Tacitus, Livy, Ovid, were great artists, and civilization will perpetuate their fame. They cannot die. What more immortal than the artistic delineations of man and of nature which the poets and historians wrought out with so much labor and genius?
When Tacitus surveyed the primitive simplicity of the Germans, he discovered some permanent maxims, or customs, of public and private life, which were preserved by faithful tradition till the introduction of the art of writing, and of the Latin tongue.
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