They, however, also contain examples of that severity of taste which has always distinguished Latin criticism, and of which Pollio is the great example. Messala, as we learn, was _Latini utique sermonis observator diligentissimus_, and he said of Latro (whom Seneca’s later taste admired) “_sua_ lingua disertus est”—"He is an eloquent man in his own lingo." Seneca himself, however, is by no means tolerant of excessive conceit, and rebukes the class of “sentence” which, he tells us, some charged upon Publilius as inventor. The examples given are in the case of a disinherited son found with poison, which he spills on discovery in the interior of his father’s house: and the sentences are, “He washed out his disinheriting with poison, and what he spilt was my death,” both being supposed to be spoken by the father. And in another stock case—the curious one which has more than one historical analogue, where the Prætor Flamininus was accused of having had a condemned man’s throat cut at dinner, to amuse a courtesan who said she had never seen a man die—the unlucky Murredius is said to have arranged a _tetracolon_—a four-membered antithesis: “The courts are made subservient to the bed-chamber; the prætor to a harlot; the prison to the banquet; day to night”; as to which last Seneca justly asks, “What sense has it?” On the whole, this very valuable and interesting book, which has been spoken of with surprisingly uncritical contempt by some, and to which I should like to devote much greater space, forms, with Pliny’s _Letters_ and Quintilian, the great trinity of documents for appreciating directly the state of Latin opinion as to literature, and its causes, in the first century after Christ, while with Cicero and Horace it forms a similar trinity for that in the last century before Christ. And it is needless to say that these two periods were, early _avant-coureurs_ and belated decadents excepted, the flourishing time of classical Latin literature. Of this state and these causes we shall speak generally later.