In some other agreements and differences we find ourselves more at home. The everlasting questions of archaic or modern [Sidenote: _Ornate or plain style._] language, of conceited or direct thought, of ornate or plain style, occupied the critics of the end of the first and the beginning of the second century, just as they have occupied those of more recent pasts, are occupying those of the present, and will occupy those of the future. As has been indicated in detail, there was not here quite the critical unanimity which some periods have shown on these and similar questions. Among the general there was something like an agreement; it seems undeniable that the popular taste of Roman audiences at recitations ran towards elaborate and slightly archaic phraseology, to Greek literary subjects, and (both in verse-epics and tragedies and in prose declamations) to topsy-turvy conceit. This was evidently frequent in verse, though time has carried away most traces of it; and in prose it is not entirely alien from the magnificent phrase-making of Tacitus, it shows itself amply in the rhetoric of Seneca the son, as in the earlier rhetorical examples of Seneca the father, is almost openly defended by Pliny, and seems to receive a certain amount of “colour” (as the rhetoricians themselves would have said) even from some passages of Quintilian. It is very noteworthy that all these prose-writers incline more or less to the artificial side, while the verse-satirists argue and sally for terseness, elegance, concinnity. And the cause may not improbably be sought in those very declamations of which mention has been so often made. We have no enormous stock of them, which is not to be regretted; but in the surviving examples we have material which is welcome in its way, and which amply proves what has been said.[376] Footnote 376: I am not sure that I should have given any place here to Cornelius Fronto, if his ticket of admission had not been (rather contumeliously) countersigned by Mr Nettleship. The low opinion which Marcus Aurelius seems to have had of literature may possibly have been in part excused by his preceptor’s utterances on the subject. He appears to have been an eminent representative of the “labelling” school of critics. Lucilius is “gracile” (this is not quite Horace’s view), Albucius and Pacuvius mediocre, Accius unequal, Ennius multiform. Sallust writes history _structe_, Pictor _incondite_, Claudius _lepide_, Antias _invenuste_, Sisenna _longinque_, Cato _verbis multijugis_, Cœlius _singulis_. One cannot help “nodding approval and saying, ‘This is very satisfactory to know,’” as Lady Kew did when she was informed that “Alfred was a trump, and Ethel a brick, and Barnes a snob.” But if Mr Nettleship thought that æsthetic, as opposed to philosophical, criticism could not get beyond this system of tickets-of-leave, he was surely mistaken. CHAPTER III.