alludes to Greek authors, while he is full of references to those of his own country. The eminent grammarians of the age, Aemilius Asper, Marcus Valerius Probus, Quintus Asconius Pedianus, show the same tendency; their main work was in commenting on the great Latin writers. The elaborate editions of the Latin poets, from Lucretius to Persius, produced by Probus, and the commentaries on Terence, Cicero, Sallust, and Virgil by Asconius and Asper, were the work of a generation to whom these authors had become in effect the classics. But literature, as the event proved not for the first or the last time, cannot live long on the study of the classics alone. III. TACITUS. The end, however, was not yet; and in the generation which immediately followed, the single imposing figure of Cornelius Tacitus, the last of the great classical writers, adds a final and, as it were, a sunset splendour to the literature of Rome. The reigns of Nerva and Trajan, however much they were hailed as the beginning of a golden age, were really far less fertile in literary works than those of the Flavian Emperors; and the boasted restoration of freedom of speech was almost immediately followed by an all but complete silence of the Latin tongue. When to the name of Tacitus are added those of Juvenal and the younger Pliny, there is literally almost no other author--none certainly of the slightest literary importance--to be chronicled until the reign of Hadrian; and even then the principal authors are Greek, while mere compilers or grammarians like Gellius and Suetonius are all that Latin literature has to show. The beginnings of Christian literature in Minucius Felix, and of mediaeval literature in Apuleius and the author of the _Pervigilium Veneris,_ rise in an age scanty in the amount and below mediocrity in the substance of its production.