dialogue ensues, in which the unimportance of what is ordinarily termed good or bad fortune, the nature of Providence, the divine order of the world, chance, free will, and similar subjects, are discussed. The style is the artificial, ornate style of the time, held in check by the logical sequence of the argument. Boëthius was a Christian, but in his adversity he turned to philosophy for consolation, and his philosophy is no more Christian than is that of Cicero. Yet his teachings, though not belonging to any one religion, are essentially religious. It is not wonderful that the _Consolation_ was much read in the Middle Ages, and has continued to find many readers in later times. [Sidenote: Later literature no longer Roman.] There were still, in the sixth century, men who, like Boëthius, could find, amid the disorders of the times, the leisure and the taste for study; and the only kind of study possible was that of the ancient literature. But Boëthius is the last in whom the ancient thoughts and feelings appear clad in literary form. Throughout the Middle Ages some of the classical writers, especially Virgil, were read and copied in monasteries, and those laymen who received a clerkly education learned Latin as the only language (except the more distant and difficult Greek) in which a literature existed; but Latin was then, as now, a language of the past, even though it was still used for literary purposes, and the ancient civilization was far less understood than now. Writings in Latin after Boëthius belong not to Roman literature, but to the literature of the church and to that of the various nations of Europe.