Seneca is a man of real genius, which after all is the main thing: his influence upon literature has been a most beneficial one; and this I say the more readily, as I dislike him so much. The opinion Dio Cassius gives of him, has a great deal in it which is true and correct; but it is exaggerated, and much too bitter. His affected and sentimental style, strikingly reminds one of a French school, of which Rousseau and Buffon were the founders, and which owing to its faults would be quite unbearable, had it not originated from men of such transcendent talent. Seneca, however, is not to be compared with either of them for loftiness of intellect. _Diderot’s Essai sur le règne de Claude et de Néron_, is a very remarkable book, and the contrast between him and Dio Cassius is highly interesting: his too was a very ingenious mind, and his manner was like that of Seneca, as he also was but the creature of his age. In the time of Nero, lived Lucan, whose poetry is of the school of Seneca, a striking proof how much more intolerable this mannerism is in poetry than in prose. Bernardin de St. Pierre and Chateaubriand are of the same school: it would be still more bearable, did it not always fall into moralizing sentimentality, which is the case with the former, whilst Chateaubriand is neither more nor less than a bad Lucan. The latter kept his ground until late in the middle ages, and was immensely read, almost as much as Virgil: people were divided into the Virgilian and Lucanian school. The true restorator of good taste in Rome was Quintilian, who is by no means to be reckoned as one of the _argentea ætas_. With that insupportable mannerism Nero also was tainted; whose talent no one can deny, but who, wherever he was not a fiend, showed himself strange and wrong-headed. In prose the same tone pervaded history also: Fabius Rusticus, who was so much read, has undoubtedly written likewise in the Annæan manner.