In the former volume of this work, I had traced the progress of the language of the Romans, and treated of the different poets by whom it was adorned till the era of Augustus. I had chiefly occasion, in the course of that part of my inquiry, to compare the poetical productions of Rome with those of Greece, and to show that the Latin poetry of this early age, being modelled on that of Athens or Alexandria, had acquired an air of preparation and authorship, and appeared to have been written to obtain the cold approbation of the public, or smiles of a Patrician patron, while the native lines of the Grecian bards seem to be poured fourth like the Delphic oracles, because the god which inspired them was too great to be contained within the bosom. In the prose compositions of the Romans, which have been considered in the present volume, though the _exemplaria Græca_ were still the models of style, we have not observed the same servility of imitation. The agricultural writers of Latium treated of a subject in a great measure foreign to the maritime feelings and commercial occupations of the Greeks; while, in the Latin historians, orators, and philosophers, we listen to a tone of practical utility, derived from the familiar acquaintance which their authors exercised with the affairs of life. The old Latin historians were for the most part themselves engaged in the affairs they related, and almost every oration of Cicero was actually delivered in the Senate or Forum. Among the Romans, philosophy was not, as it had been with many of the Greeks, an academic dream or speculation, which was substituted for the realities of life. In Rome, philosophic inquiries were chiefly prosecuted as supplying arguments and illustrations to the patron for his conflicts in the Forum, and as guiding the citizen in the discharge of his duties to the commonwealth. Those studies, in short, alone were valued, which, as it is beautifully expressed by Cicero, in the person of Lælius—“Efficiant ut usui civitati simus: id enim esse præclarissimum sapientiæ munus, maximumque virtutis documentum puto.” APPENDIX. “Some felt the silent stroke of mouldering age, Some hostile fury, some religious rage: Barbarian blindness, Christian zeal conspire, And Papal piety, and Gothic fire.” POPE’S _Epistle to Addison_. APPENDIX.