We may mark this passage as, of many interesting ones, that which gives us Pliny’s measure as a literary critic best. Footnote 367: _Diserti_, used here, as _disertior_ is lower, with the slightly invidious sense which often attaches to the word, just as it does to the English equivalent here used for it. Footnote 368: _Est enim res difficilis, ardua, fastidiosa, et quæ eos, a quibus contemnitur, invicem contemnat._ But the list of his noteworthy “places” is by no means closed. VI. 21 gives us his standpoint in another famous quarrel—that of Ancients and Moderns. He admires the former, but by no means so as to despise the latter. He does not hold with the doctrine of the senescence of nature. He recently heard Vergilius Romanus recite a comedy in the Old Comedy kind, which was as good as it could be. The same man has written mimiambics with perfect grace, comedies in another kind as good as Menander’s; he has force, grandeur, subtlety, bitterness, sweetness, neatness, he glorifies virtue, attacks vice, invents his personages,[369] and uses real ones, with equal appropriateness. And (as by this time we begin to expect in such cases) “In writing about _me_ he has only gone wrong by excessive kindness; and, after all, poets may feign.” One sees that the excellent Pliny’s geese were swans in every quill. Footnote 369: So I translate _nominibus_. VII. 4 deals at some length with his own poems, and gives some hexameters about Tiro and Cicero, which are in style quite worthy of the subject. There are some elegiacs (rather better) in vii. 8, which is an elaborate recommendation of literary study—the turning of Greek into Latin, and _vice versa_, the refashioning and rearrangement of work already done, the alternation of oratorical practice with history, letter-writing, and verse of the lighter kind, which receives an elaborate and not unhappy encomium. As for reading, read all the best models in all the styles in which you write. VII. 17 is on recitation; 20 of the same book is one of several interesting, though slightly amusing, letters to Tacitus, in which Pliny implies it to be his own opinion, and quotes it as that of others, that he and Tacitus were the two greatest literary men of Rome, and that it was quite wonderful that they were such friends. What Tacitus thought of the conjunction we do not know; he was probably too well bred a man to put his thought in words, though a Tacitean expression of it would indeed be a treasure. In vii. 25 we meet another “swan,” Terentius Junior, who writes things _quam tersa omnia! quam Latina! quam Græca!_ Later, in the 30th, a friend having compared his work, in vindication of Helvidius Priscus, to that of Demosthenes against Midias, he confesses that he had had the piece in view, though he thinks it would have been _improbum et pæne furiosum_ to have imagined rivalry possible. In viii. 4 he encourages the friend to write an epic poem in Greek on the Dacian war, thereby