THE AUGUSTAN AGE.--The Augustan Age, which was only really very great if under this title is also included the epoch of Caesar and also that of Octavius, and thus it was understood by our ancestors, does not fail to offer writers of fine genius. These are Virgil, Horace, and Titus-Livy. TITUS-LIVY.--Titus-Livy, who is one of the purest and most beautiful writers and an orator of seductive talent in his own chamber, wrote a Roman history composed, as to the first portion, of the legends transmitted at Rome from generation to generation, and in which it is impossible for us to distinguish the false from the true; for two-thirds of the work made very accurate investigations of all that previous historians and the annals of the pontiffs could give the author. As has been observed, Titus-Livy, being a Cisalpine, was a Gaul who already possessed the French qualities: order, clearness, regulated development, sustained and careful style, oratorical tastes. An ardent patriot, republican at his soul, yet treated in friendly fashion by Augustus, he wrote Roman history at first, no doubt, to make it known, but above all to inspire the Romans of his own time with admiration, respect, and love for the austere morals and exalted virtues of their ancestors. He erected a monument, one portion of which is unhappily destroyed, but into which modern tragedians have often quarried and which orators have not scorned when desiring to instruct themselves in their art. VIRGIL.--Virgil came from almost the same country. His was a charming soul, tender and gentle, infinitely capable of friendship, very pure and white, as Horace said, with a tendency to melancholy. The two sources of his inspiration were Homer and love of Rome; add, for a time, Theocritus. Lover of the country and of moral life, he first wrote those delicious _Bucolics_ wherein he did not venture to be as realistic as the Sicilian poet, but in which there is not only infinite grace and delicate sensibility, but also, in certain verses, admirable descriptions that arouse memories of those of La Fontaine. Lover of the soil and desirous, in harmony with Augustus, to attract the Italians back to a taste for agriculture, he wrote the _Georgics_: that is, the toils of the field, describing these labours with singular exactitude and precision; then, to give the reader variety, he introduced from time to time an episode which is a fragment of history or of mythological legend. At length, desirous of attributing to Rome the most glorious past possible, he revived the old legend which claimed that the ancient kings of Rome descended from the famous kings of Troy in her zenith, and he composed the _Aeneid_. The _Aeneid_ is at once both an _Odyssey_ and an _Iliad_. The first five books containing the adventures of Aeneas after the fall of Troy until his arrival in Italy form an _Odyssey_; the last six books, containing the combats of Aeneas in Italy in order to conquer a place for himself, form an _Iliad_. In