Livy wishes there to be short and pithy, and he is unintelligible: the last named passage is the most difficult which I know of in the good Latin prose. Wherever he is not trying to be concise, he is very easy. At the side of Tacitus, who stands quite alone,—as did Æschylus and Sophocles, as did many a lyric poet, and as did Lessing, who among our German prose writers has not found his equal,—but whose transcendent merits were not acknowledged by his age, as men were glad to soothe their feelings by placing a number of people on a par with him; Pliny the Younger was mentioned in his day. Pliny’s letters are psychologically most interesting; they give one much insight into the human mind. He was one of the most good natured of men, but exceedingly vain: before the eyes of the public, he had a strong feeling of his own greatness and classicality. Although in conversation with his friends, he certainly used to criticise Tacitus, and to deplore his defects; in his letters to him, he is full of humility, and makes himself infinitely small, just that Tacitus might be favourably disposed towards him, and extol him highly: he would say that the public always named him and Tacitus together; but that he himself was well aware how much indeed Tacitus was his superior. His letters are most instructive, and give us an invaluable picture of the times; and we recognise in Pliny himself a benevolent and useful man, who makes a very good use of his large fortune, one who was an excellent civil governor, but never free from childish vanity: he always tells his friends the good which he does, of course in the strictest confidence, and these letters are afterwards published. Notwithstanding all this, he is a man of much understanding and talent, being strikingly like the Parisian writers of the eighteenth century: whole phrases in him are quite French, as the late Mr. Spalding has rightly observed. He is therefore hardly to be translated into German; but he may be rendered most beautifully into French. One may see from these letters, that a sort of current coin of intellect had then come into use; and this was indeed a matter of course in a time which had been preceded by a host of eminent men: a great many thoughts had become common property, so as to belong to the whole generation, and a chord which had once been struck by a man like Tacitus, could not but vibrate for a long time. Moreover, it was an age of comfort and of cheerfulness after long depression. Every thing in it had thus been brought to a level of mediocrity, and the self-same persons, under different circumstances, would in all likelihood have been very little indeed. We may judge of them in some measure from Florus, who lived in the reign of Trajan. The earlier history was already so far behind them, that people only wanted to have a general notion of it. The book is quite a book of the time; insufferably frivolous, and displaying a