His lucid and accurate description of the amber of the Baltic seems merely introduced in order to point a sarcastic reference to Roman luxury; and the whole of the extremely valuable account of the social life of the Western German tribes is drawn in implicit or expressed contrast to the elaborate social conventions of what he considers a corrupt and degenerate civilisation. The exaggeration of the sentiment is more marked than in any of his other writings; thus the fine outburst, _Nemo illic vitia ridet, nec corrumpere et corrumpi seculum vocatur,_ concludes a passage in which he gravely suggests that the invention of writing is fatal to moral innocence; and though he is candid enough to note the qualities of laziness and drunkenness which the Germans shared with other half-barbarous races, he glosses over the other quality common to savages, want of feeling, with the sounding and grandiose commonplace, expressed in a phrase of characteristic force and brevity, _feminis lugere honestum est, viris meminisse_. The _Agricola,_ perhaps the most beautiful piece of biography in ancient literature, stands on a much higher level than the _Germania,_ because here his heart was in the work. The rhetorical bent is now fully under control, while his mastery over "disposition" (to use the term of the schools), or what one might call the architectural quality of the book, could only have been gained by such large and deep study of the art of rhetoric as is inculcated by Quintilian. The _Agricola_ has the stateliness, the ordered movement, of a funeral oration; the peroration, as it might not unfairly be called, of the two concluding chapters, reaches the highest level of the grave Roman eloquence, and its language vibrates with a depth of feeling to which Lucretius and Virgil alone in their greatest passages offer a parallel in Latin. The sentence, with its subtle Virgilian echoes, in which he laments his own and his wife's absence from Agricola's death-bed--_omnia sine dubio, optime parentum, adsidente amantissima uxore superfuere honori tuo; paucioribus tamen lacrimis comploratus es, et novissima in luce desideraverunt aliquid oculi tui_--shows a new and strange power in Latin. It is still the ancient language, but it anticipates in its cadences the language of the Vulgate and of the statelier mediaeval prose.