1. DECLINE OF ROMAN LITERATURE.--With the death of Augustus began the decline of Roman literature, and a few names only rescue the first years of this period from the charge of a corrupt and vitiated taste. After a while, indeed, political circumstances again became more favorable; the dangers, which paralyzed genius and talent, and prevented their free exercise under Tiberius and his tyrannical successors, diminished, and a more liberal system of administration ensued under Vespasian and Titus. Juvenal and Tacitus then stood forth, as the representatives of the old Roman independence. Vigor of thought communicated itself to the language; a taste for the sublime and beautiful, to a certain extent, revived, although it did not attain to the perfection which shed a lustre over the Augustan age. Between the ages of Horace and Juvenal, Cicero and Tacitus, there was a gap of half a century, in which Roman genius was slumbering. The gradual growth of a spirit of adulation deterred all who were qualified for the task of the historian from attempting it. Fear, during the lifetime of Tiberius and Caligula, Claudius and Nero, and hatred, still fresh after their deaths, rendered all accounts of their reigns false. And the same causes which silenced the voice of history extinguished the genius of poetry and oratory. As liberty declined, natural eloquence decayed; the orator sought only to please the corrupt taste of his audiences with strange and exaggerated statements; the poet aimed to win public admiration through a style over-laden with ornament, and florid and diffuse descriptions. Literature, in order to flourish, requires the genial sunshine of human sympathy; it needs either the patronage of the great, or the favor of the people. Immediately after the death of Augustus, patronage was withdrawn, and there was no public sympathy to supply its place. In the reign of Nero, literature partially revived; for, though the bloodiest of tyrants, he had a taste for art and poetry, and an ambition to excel in refinement.