shared his sentiments have been often and harshly censured on this account, and certainly the expressions of his displeasure are not unfrequently characterized by the bluntness and narrowness peculiar to him; on a closer consideration, however, we must not only confess him to have been in individual instances substantially right, but we must also acknowledge that the national opposition in this field, more than anywhere else, went beyond the manifestly inadequate line of mere negative defence.  When his younger contemporary, Aulus Postumius Albinus, who was an object of ridicule to the Hellenes themselves by his offensive Hellenizing, and who, for example, even manufactured Greek verses—­when this Albinus in the preface to his historical treatise pleaded in excuse for his defective Greek that he was by birth a Roman—­was not the question quite in place, whether he had been doomed by authority of law to meddle with matters which he did not understand?  Were the trades of the professional translator of comedies and of the poet celebrating heroes for bread and protection more honourable, perhaps, two thousand years ago than they are now?  Had Cato not reason to make it a reproach against Nobilior, that he took Ennius—­who, we may add, glorified in his verses the Roman potentates without respect of persons, and overloaded Cato himself with praise—­along with him to Ambracia as the celebrator of his future achievements?  Had he not reason to revile the Greeks, with whom he had become acquainted in Rome and Athens, as an incorrigibly wretched pack?  This opposition to the culture of the age and the Hellenism of the day was well warranted; but Cato was by no means chargeable with an opposition to culture and to Hellenism in general.  On the contrary it is the highest merit of the national party, that they comprehended very clearly the necessity of creating a Latin literature and of bringing the stimulating influences of Hellenism to bear on it; only their intention was, that Latin literature should not be a mere copy taken from the Greek and intruded on the national feelings of Rome, but should, while fertilized by Greek influences, be developed in accordance with Italian nationality.  With a genial instinct, which attests not so much the sagacity of individuals as the elevation of the epoch, they perceived that in the case of Rome, owing to the total want of earlier poetical productiveness, history furnished the only subject-matter for the development of an intellectual life of their own.  Rome was, what Greece was not, a state; and the mighty consciousness of this truth lay at the root both of the bold attempt which Naevius made to attain by means of history a Roman epos and a Roman drama, and of the creation of Latin prose by Cato.  It is true that the endeavour to replace the gods and heroes of legend by the kings and consuls of Rome resembles the attempt of the giants to storm heaven by means of mountains piled one above another:  without a world of gods there is no