This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 edition. Excerpt: ...these slavish compositions encouraged his propensity to exceed the limits of truth and nature. These imperfections, however, are compensated in some degree by the poetical virtues of Claudian. He was endowed with the rare and precious talent of raising the meanest, of adorning the most barren, and of diversifying the most similar topics; his coloring, more especially in descriptive poetry, is soft and splendid; and he seldom fails to display, and even to abuse, the advantages of a cultivated understanding, a copious fancy, an easy and sometimes forcible expression, and a perpetual flow of harmonious versification. To these commendations, independent of any accidents of time and place, we must add the peculiar merit which Claudian derived from the unfavorable circumstances of his birth. In the decline of arts and of empire, a native of Egypt,"8 who had received the education of a Greek, assumed in a mature age the familiar use and absolute command of the Latin language,1" snared above the heads of his feeble con "" National vanity has made him a Florentine or a Spaniard. But the first Epistle of Claudian proves him a native of Alexandria (Fabricius, Biblioth. Latin, torn. iii. p. 191-202, edit. Ernest.). 119 His first Latin verses were composed during the consulship of Probinus, A.d. 395: Romanos bihimus primmn, te consule, fontes, Et Latioe cessit Graia Thalia toga;. temporaries, and placed himself, after an interval of three hundred years, among the poets of ancient Rome.1" Besides some Greek epigrams, which are still extant, the Latin poet had composed, in Greek, the Antiquities of Tarsus, Anazarbus, Beiytus, Nice, etc. It is more easy to supply the loss of good poetry than of authentic history. VM Strada...