as all cultured Romans spoke it.  But, mirabile dictu, it was Latin as Ennius had composed it:  he was writing in Ennius’ meter.  I can only understand that Greek had so swamped the Latin soul, that for a century or more cultured Latin had been spoken in quantity, not in accent; in the Greek manner, and with the Greek rhythm.  Ennius had come to be appreciable as meter and music to Roman ears; which he certainly could not have been in his own day.

So we may say that there is in a sense no Roman literature at all.  Nothing grew out of the old Saturnian ballad-meter,—­except perhaps Catullus, who certainly had no high inspiring impersonal song to sing.  The Roman soul never grew up, never learned to express itself in its own way; before it had had time to do so, the Greek impulse that should have quickened it, swamped it.  You may think of Japan, swamped by Chinese culture in the sixth century A.D., as a parallel case; but no; there Buddhism, under real spiritual Teachers, came in at the same time, and fostered all that was noblest in the Japanese soul, so that the result was fair and splendid.  A more cognate case is that of the Turks, who suffered through suddenly conquering Persia while they were still barbarous, and taking on, outwardly, Persian culture wholesale; Turkish and Latin literature are perhaps on a par for originality.  But if the Greek impulse had touched and wakened Rome under the aegis of Pythagoreanism,—­Rome might have become, possibly, as fine a thing as Japan.  True, the Crest-Wave had to roll in to Rome presently, and to raise up a great literature there.  But whose is the greatest name in it?  A Gaul’s, who imitated Greek models.  There is something artificial in the combination; and you guess that whatever most splendid effort may be here, the result cannot be supreme.  The greatest name in Latin prose, too,—­Livy’s—­was that of a Gaul.

And herefrom we may gather what mingling of forces is needed to produce the great ages and results in literature.  You have a country; a tract of earth with the Earth-breath playing up through the soil of it; you have the components or elements of a race mixed together on that soil, and molded by that play of the Earth-breath into homogeneity, and among them, from smallest beginnings in folk-verse, the body of a literature must grow up.  Then in due season it must be quickened:  on the outer plane by an impulse from abroad,—­intercourse with allies, or resistance to an invader; and on the inner, by an inrush of Crest-Wave egos.  There must be that foreign torch applied,—­that spark of inter-nationalism; and there must be the entry of the vanguard of the Host of Souls with its great captains and marshals, bringing with them, to exhibit once more in this world, the loot of many lands and ages and old incarnations; which thing they shall do through a sudden efflorescence of the literature that has grown up slowly to the point of being ready for them.  Such natural growth happened in Greece,