The Latin style of Plautus excels in briskness of dialogue, as well as purity of expression, and has been highly extolled by the learned Roman grammarians, particularly by Varro, who declares, that if the Muses were to speak Latin they would employ his diction(280); but as M. Schlegel has remarked, it is necessary to distinguish between the opinion of philologers, and that of critics and poets. Plautus wrote at a period when his country as yet possessed no written or literary language. Every phrase was drawn from the living source of conversation. This early simplicity seemed pleasing and artless to those Romans, who lived in an age of excessive refinement and cultivation; but this apparent merit was rather accidental than the effect of poetic art. Making, however, some allowance for this, there can be no doubt that Plautus wonderfully improved and refined the Latin language from the rude form in which it had been moulded by Ennius. That he should have effected such an alteration is not a little remarkable. Plautus was nearly contemporary with the Father of Roman song—according to most accounts he was born a slave—he was condemned, during part of his life, to the drudgery of the lowest manual labour—and, so far as we learn, he was not distinguished by the patronage of the Great, or admitted into Patrician society. Ennius, on the other hand, if he did not pass his life in affluence, spent it in the exercise of an honourable profession, and was the chosen familiar friend of Cato, Scipio Africanus, Fulvius Nobilior, and Lælius, the most learned as well as polished citizens of the Roman republic, whose conversation in their unrestrained intercourse must have bestowed on him advantages which Plautus never enjoyed. But perhaps the circumstance of his Greek original, which contributed so much to his learning and refinement, and qualified him for such exalted society, may have been unfavourable to that native purity of Latin diction, which the Umbrian slave imbibed from the unmixed fountains of conversation and nature.