The uniform result of all experiments has only been to demonstrate the scientific soundness of the ordinary process of water-retting, and all the proposed improvements of recent times seek to obviate the tediousness, difficulties and uncertainties of the process as carried on in the open air.
Producing, as he certainly has produced, work which classes him with the greatest names in literature, he has also signed an extraordinary quantity of verse which has not merely the defects of genius, irregularity, extravagance, bizarrete, but the faults which we are apt to regard as exclusively belonging to those who lack genius, to wit, the dulness, and tediousness of mediocrity.
The most superficial comparison of his account of the earliest days of Rome with that given by Dionysius shows from what depths of tediousness he was preservetl by these qualities.