nerve me to some new enterprise of thought which may not be worthless.
I cannot conceive that Lucretius, when he meditated that poem whose
doctrines are yet the basis of our metaphysical knowledge, and whose
eloquence has been the wonder of mankind, wrote in awe of such censure
as the hired sophists of the impure and superstitious noblemen of Rome
might affix to what he should produce. It was at the period when
Greece was led captive and Asia made tributary to the Republic, fast
verging itself to slavery and ruin, that a multitude of Syrian
captives, bigoted to the worship of their obscene Ashtaroth, and the
unworthy successors of Socrates and Zeno, found there a precarious
subsistence by administering, under the name of freedmen, to the vices
and vanities of the great. These wretched men were skilled to plead,
with a superficial but plausible set of sophisms, in favour of that
contempt for virtue which is the portion of slaves, and that faith in
portents, the most fatal substitute for benevolence in the
imaginations of men, which, arising from the enslaved communities of
the East, then first began to overwhelm the western nations in its
stream. Were these the kind of men whose disapprobation the wise and
lofty-minded Lucretius should have regarded with a salutary awe? The
latest and perhaps the meanest of those who follow in his footsteps
would disdain to hold life on such conditions.

The Poem now presented to the Public occupied little more than six
months in the composition. That period has been devoted to the task
with unremitting ardour and enthusiasm. I have exercised a watchful
and earnest criticism on my work as it grew under my hands. I would
willingly have sent it forth to the world with that perfection which
long labour and revision is said to bestow. But I found that, if I
should gain something in exactness by this method, I might lose much
of the newness and energy of imagery and language as it flowed fresh