There is something like a miniature review in his description of the works of Pompeius Saturninus to Erucius in i. 16. This Pompey has something so _varium_, so _flexibile_, so _multiplex_, that he holds Pliny’s entire attention. He had heard him pleading both with and without preparation, _acriter et ardenter, nec minus polite et ornate_. There were in these speeches _acutæ, crebræque sententiæ_, a grave and decorous construction, sonorous and archaic terms (Martial and Persius would have shaken heads). “All these things,” he says, “please strangely when they are rolled forth in a rushing flood, and they please even if they are read over again. You will think as I do when you have his orations in your hands, orations comparable to those of any of the ancients whom he rivals. Yet he is still more satisfactory in History, whether you take his brevity, or his light, or his sweetness, or his splendour, or his sublimity. In popular addresses he is the same as in Oratory, though more compressed and circumscript, and wound together. His verses are as good as Catullus or Calvus, and full of elegance, sweetness, bitterness, love! and his Letters (which he calls his wife’s) are like Plautus or Terence without the metre.” Truly an Admirable Crichton of a Pompeius Saturninus! and great pity it is that he has not come down to us, this “Cambridge the everything”[357]—of _circa_ 100 A.D. Footnote 351: It did not seem necessary to specify editions of Persius, Juvenal, and Martial. For Pliny I use that of Keil, Leipsic, 1886. Footnote 352: I. vi. Ed. cit., p. 5. Footnote 353: III. 21, p. 65. Footnote 354: _V. supra_, p. 264. Footnote 355: _Hortatus es ut epistolas si quas paulo accuratius scripsissem colligerem ... Collegi._ Footnote 356: ληκύθους. The word, whether from the use of its diminutive in the _Frogs_ or not, seems to have become a stock metaphor for rhetorical tropes. It has even been compared to _ampulla_, though I fancy it was not quite so uncomplimentary, and meant “prettiness,” “conceit,” rather than “bombast.” Both, however, illustrate the view, put frequently in Book I. and here, as to the ancient conception of style. Footnote 357: If the reader is in ignorance of this worthy, he can cure his disease by any one of three pleasant medicines—Boswell, Horace Walpole, and Mr Austin Dobson’s _Eighteenth Century Vignettes_.