The decline of literature under Hadrian becomes yet more marked than it had been under Trajan. The inscriptions are in a quite barbarous Latin, the grammatical forms being utterly disregarded, and all the cases jumbled together. I have seen at Rome an inscription of the time of Hadrian, which is composed in a real _lingua rustica_. Just so, we have in Egypt inscriptions, which pass for Greek, but are entirely barbarous. Such inscriptions, although still to be met with in Italy only far and between, are yet enough to show in what a state the population was even then, the gaps which had been made in it by the civil wars, having been filled up by myriads of slaves. A jargon was formed in the altogether desolate parts of Italy, from whence it also spread to Rome; just what happened in the case of the Wends, when about a hundred and fifty years ago they were compelled to speak German. This is the _lingua rustica_, or _vulgaris_, like that of the black slaves in the American colonies. People of rank, no doubt, still spoke Latin; they learned it as the English in the colonies do their own language, after having spoken when children that of the Creoles. I do not doubt in the least that Pliny and Tacitus, even if they knew a _lingua rustica_ at all, talked to each other as they wrote. A language which is grown poor, as ours did after the thirty years’ war,[49] tries to recruit itself from books and from the earlier writers. The latter were therefore read for the sake of their language; the older the style, the more valued was the writer. Hence indeed it was that Plautus, Nævius, Ennius, whom people in Seneca’s time still held in such contempt, were now read with so much favour: the older the language, the purer it was deemed. This fondness for them caused the most correct authors to be neglected; as for instance, Cicero was for Cato and Gracchus. The contempt for the older writers, certainly lasted from Virgil to the end of the first century of our era. In like manner, not a very long while ago were Walther von der Vogelweide and Zacharias Theobald extolled among us as models, the former for poetry, the latter for historical writing. Hadrian, being himself a lover of the _antiquitas_, contributed by his example to this revival of the ancient literature; but he did much more in favour of that of the Greeks. Greek had no doubt also kept itself more alive: in Athens, the people in all likelihood did not yet speak at all barbarously. There were very few Greek writers indeed, and Hadrian only brought them out too much. To write Greek poetry got into fashion more than it had ever been, and he gave pensions for it; as for instance, to the lyric poet Mesomedes.