masters of Atticism: if _all_, how can you possibly succeed, when their characters are so opposite? Let me further ask you, whether Demetrius Phalereus spoke in the Attic style? In my opinion, his Orations have the very smell of Athens. But he is certainly more florid than either Hyperides or Lysias; partly from the natural turn of his genius, and partly by choice. There were likewise two others, at the time we are speaking of, whose characters were equally dissimilar; and yet both of them were truly _Attic_. The first (Charisius) was the author of a number of speeches, which he composed for his friends, professedly in imitation of Lysias:--and the other (Demochares, the nephew of Demosthenes) wrote several Orations, and a regular History of what was transacted in Athens under his own observation; not so much, indeed, in the style of an Historian, as of an Orator. Hegesias took the former for his model, and had so vain a conceit of his own taste for Atticism, that he considered his predecessors, who were really masters of it, as mere rustics in comparison of himself. But what can be more insipid, more frivolous, or more puerile, than that very concinnity of expression which he actually acquired?"--"_But still we wish to resemble the Attic Speakers_."--"Do so, by all means. But were not those, then, true Attic Speakers, we have just been mentioning?"--"_Nobody denies it; and these are the men we imitate._"--"But how? when they are so very different, not only from each other, but from all the rest of their contemporaries?"--"_True; but Thucydides is our leading pattern_."--"This too I can allow, if you design to compose histories, instead of pleading causes. For Thucydides was both an exact, and a stately historian: but he never intended to write models for conducting a judicial process. I will even go so far as to add, that I have often commended the speeches which he has inserted into his history in great numbers; though I must frankly own, that I neither _could_ imitate them, if I _would,_ nor indeed _would,_ if I _could;_ like a man who would neither choose his wine so new as to have been turned off in the preceding vintage, nor so excessively old as to date its age from the consulship of Opimius or Anicius."--"_The latter_, you'll say, _bears the highest price_." "Very probable; but when it has too much age, it has lost that delicious flavour which pleases the palate, and, in my opinion, is scarcely tolerable."--"_Would you choose, then, when you have a mind to regale yourself, to apply to a fresh, unripened cask?_" "By no means; but still there is a certain age, when good wine arrives at its utmost perfection. In the same manner, I would recommend neither a raw, unmellowed style, which, (if I may so express myself) has been newly drawn off from the vat; nor the rough, and antiquated language of the grave and manly Thucydides. For even _he_, if he had lived a few years later, would