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Thus Plato did not hesitate to make the love of all wines, under whatever guise, excuse, or occasion, the test of a true taste for wine and an unfeigned adoration of Bacchus; and, like Lucretius after him, he wittily compiled a list of names, by which the lover will flatter the most opposite qualities, if they only succeed in arousing his inclination.
The ambitious, the sensual, have hardly time for reasoning, and for embracing a bad system; they have other things to do than comparing Lucretius with Socrates. That is how things go among us.
The same doctrine was taught by Lucretius, two thousand years ago. "It often makes a great difference," he said, "with what things, and in what positions the same first-beginnings are held in union, and what motions they mutually impart and receive."
And then, in literature, two figures mentionable: Lucretius, thinker and philosopher in poetry: a high Roman type, and a kind of materialist, and a kind of God's warrior, and a suicide. And Catullus: no noble type; neither Roman nor Greek, but Italian perhaps; singing in the old Saturnian meters with a real lyrical fervor, but with nothing better to sing than his loves.
There was yet a third of the same kind in store for him; and when Munro himself owned that he had found instruction in the paper on Lucretius, we may say that Fleeming had been crowned in the Capitol of reviewing. Nor were friends wanting. Captain and Mrs. Jenkin, Mr. and Mrs. Austin, Clerk Maxwell, Miss Bell of Manchester, and others, came to them on visits. Mr.
He well understood the ancients, had an unusual penetration in discovering their beauties, and it appears by his own translation of Lucretius, how elegantly he could cloath them in an English attire. His judgment was solid; he was perfectly acquainted with the rules of criticism, and he had from nature an extraordinary genius.
As opposed to the fancies of Epicurus and his poet, Lucretius, or to modern atheistic doctrines of similar character, we have no qualification or condition to suggest which might change its force or significance.
Morality had always been for them a matter of family custom, parental teaching of the rules of decorum, legal doctrine regarding the universality of aequitas, and, more than they knew, of puritanic instincts inherited from a well-sifted stock. It probably did not occur to Lucretius and Vergil to ask whether this new philosophy encouraged a higher or a lower ethical standard.
To the dainty stanzas of that poem, it is true, no great struggle of reasoning was to be committed, nor would any such dispute be judiciously entrusted to the rhymes of a song of sorrow. Tennyson here proposes, rather than closes with, the ultimate question of our destiny. The conflict, for which he proves himself strong enough, is in that magnificent poem of a thinker, "Lucretius."
But it depends not altogether on the testimony of the poets: Plutarch tells us, that Lucullus, a Roman General, lost his senses by a love potion; and Caius Caligula, according to Suetonius, was thrown into a fit of madness by one which was given him by his wife Cæsonia; Lucretius too, according to some authors, fell a sacrifice to the same folly.
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