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Updated: May 17, 2025
When Plautus is at his best in the Aulularia, Bacchides, or Rudens, and most notably in the Captivi he has seldom been improved upon either in the interest of his action or in the copiousness and vivacity of his dialogue. Over and above his easy mastery of language, Plautus has a further Claim to distinction in the wide range of his manner.
If the audience fails to applaud, take offence, and give your offence words; if they get up and prepare to go out in disgust, tell them to sit down again; discipline must be maintained. It will win you credit for copiousness, if you start with the Trojan War you may if you like go right hack to the nuptials of Deucalion and Pyrrha and thence trace your subject down to to-day.
The critic thus is, as it were, swamped in this copiousness; he must select in order to grasp the whole, and confine himself to a few in order to embrace all.
Had we a picture drawn with equal copiousness and grace of the Rome of Marcus Aurelius half a century later, it would be a priceless addition to history. Pliny's world partly because it is presented with such rich detail reminds us, more than that of any other period of Roman history, of the society of our own day.
It must be, however, confessed of these writers that if they are upon common subjects often unnecessarily and unpoetically subtle, yet where scholastic speculation can be properly admitted, their copiousness and acuteness may justly be admired.
Copiousness of speech will give opportunities to capricious choice, by which some words will be preferred, and others degraded; vicissitudes of fashion will enforce the use of new, or extend the signification of known terms.
Latin It is a fact less known, but not less certain, that Latium also, while inferior to Etruria in the copiousness and massiveness of its art, was not inferior in artistic taste and practical skill.
This copiousness and facility is perhaps an advantage in extempore speaking, where no stop or break is allowed in the discourse, and where any word or any number of words almost is better than coming to a dead stand; but in written compositions it gives an air of either too much carelessness or too much labour. Mr. Jeffrey's excellence, as a public speaker, has betrayed him into this peculiarity.
The illustrative plates to which Diderot gave the most laborious attention for a period of almost thirty years, are not only remarkable for their copiousness, their clearness, their finish and in all these respects they are truly admirable but they strike us even more by the semi-poetic feeling that transforms the mere representation of a process into an animated scene of human life, stirring the sympathy and touching the imagination of the onlooker as by something dramatic.
We make no apology for the copiousness of the extracts which we are now to make, and which, we think, will sufficiently explain themselves without much commentary from us. Nothing can be fairer than the footing on which Dr Alison places his argument at the outset.
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