Yet with all his affectations and fatuities, Pliny compels respect, and even a measure of admiration, by the real goodness of his character. Where a good life is lived, it hardly becomes us to be too critical of motives and springs of action; and in Pliny's case the practice of domestic and civic virtue was accompanied by a considerable literary gift. Had we a picture drawn with equal copiousness and grace of the Rome of Marcus Aurelius half a century later, it would be a priceless addition to history. Pliny's world--partly because it is presented with such rich detail--reminds us, more than that of any other period of Roman history, of the society of our own day. To pass from Cicero's letters to his is curiously like passing from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. In other respects, indeed, they have what might be called an eighteenth century flavour. Some of the more elaborate of them would fall quite naturally into place among the essays of the _Spectator_ or the _Rambler;_ in many others the combination of thin and lucid common-sense with a vein of calculated sensibility can hardly be paralleled till we reach the age of Rousseau. Part of this real or assumed sensibility was the interest in scenery and the beauties of nature, which in Pliny, as in the eighteenth century authors, is cultivated for its own sake as an element in self-culture. In the words with which he winds up one of the most elaborate of his descriptive pieces, that on the lake of Vadimo in Tuscany--_Me nihil aeque ac naturae opera delectant_--there is an accent which hardly recurs till the age of the _Seasons_ and of Gray's _Letters_. Like Gray, Pliny took a keen pleasure in exploring the more romantic districts of his country; his description of the lake in the letter just mentioned is curiously like passages from the journal in which Gray records his discovery--for it was little less--of Thirlmere and Derwentwater. He views the Clitumnus with the eye of an accomplished landscape-gardener; he notes the cypresses on the hill, the ash and poplar groves by the water's edge; he counts the shining pebbles under the clear ice-cold water, and watches the green reflections of the overhanging trees; and finally, as Thomson or Cowper might have done, mentions the abundance of comfortable villas as the last charm of the landscape.