25 MARCH 1938, Page 26

TWO CORRECTIONS

[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—In your issue of March IIth (p. 422) your correspondent S. L. Bensusan writes : " You can't drive Nature out with a pitchfork,' wrote the wise Horace two thousand years ago, and equally you can't impose fertility by poisoning the soil."

And on p. 426 I read, under the heading "Stmt lacrimae rerun:"

" Nowhere else can one find so sustained an expression of human tenderness, of that Lucretian sense of ' the tears that are in things. "

I have no longer any morbid pride in my long-forgotten efforts, but am convinced that my good compatriots, Lucretius and Horace, would not desire my words to be attributed to

them.—I am, yours respectfully, P. VERGILIUS MARO.