If you take Sophocles, Catullus, Lucretius, the better parts of Cicero, and
so on, you may, just with two or three exceptions arising out of the
different idioms as to cases, translate page after page into good mother
English, word by word, without altering the order; but you cannot do so
with Virgil or Tibullus: if you attempt it, you will make nonsense.
* * * * *
There is a remarkable power of the picturesque in the fragments we have of
Ennius, Actius, and other very old Roman writers. This vivid manner was
lost in the Augustan age.
* * * * *
Much as the Romans owed to Greece in the beginning, whilst their mind was,
as it were, tuning itself to an after-effort of its own music, it suffered
more in proportion by the influence of Greek literature subsequently, when
it was already mature and ought to have worked for itself. It then became a
superfetation upon, and not an ingredient in, the national character. With
the exception of the stern pragmatic historian and the moral satirist, it
left nothing original to the Latin Muse.[1]
A nation, to be great, ought to be compressed in its increment by nations
more civilized than itself--as Greece by Persia; and Rome by Etruria, the
Italian states, and Carthage. I remember Commodore Decatur saying to me at
Malta, that he deplored the occupation of Louisiana by the United States,
and wished that province had been possessed by England. He thought that if
the United States got hold of Canada by conquest or cession, the last
chance of his country becoming a great compact nation would be lost.
[Footnote 1:
Perhaps it left letter-writing also. Even if the Platonic epistles are
taken as genuine, which Mr. Coleridge, to my surprise, was inclined to
believe, they can hardly interfere, I think, with the uniqueness of the
truly incomparable collections from the correspondence of Cicero and
Pliny.--ED.]
* * * * *
War in republican Rome was the offspring of its intense aristocracy of
spirit, and stood to the state in lieu of trade. As long as there was any
thing _ab extra_ to conquer, the state advanced: when nothing remained but
what was Roman, then, as a matter of course, civil war began.
_June_ 10. 1832.