The taste for archæology and old-fashioned language called forth a writer like Gellius, from whom we may learn much. He is somewhat later than Pliny; his book must be dated from the reign of M. Antoninus. His ignorance of his own age is quite inconceivable: he knows nothing about Roman institutions, so that he also most ludicrously misunderstands the ancients, being one of those who, to use Goethe’s words, “see the world but on a holiday.” Yet he has not even the least knowledge of antiquity itself, nor any notion of the law, or in fact of human life: thus for instance, he has no idea of what a colony is, although there were hundreds of them in his times. Hence his many mistakes, however agreeable an author he may be otherwise. A man of the same stamp is Fronto, the tutor of M. Antoninus: it is remarkable how he makes his pupil read authors merely for the sake of their phrases, leading him to hunt after words, as he calls it himself. Former rhetoricians had tried to produce an effect by a subtle combination of thoughts; but now it was to be done by out-of-the-way words and forms. Fronto’s hatred against Seneca really arises from a feeling of being entirely incapable of such refinement as his. There were, however, some people besides, who combined both refinement of thought and refinement of expression. Seceding from the Roman school, they formed the African one, to which belonged Apuleius and Tertullian, and which lasted to the middle of the third century, until the time of Arnobius. This African school is most incorrectly spoken off as having had quite a dialect of its own, the peculiarities of its diction are all of them expressions of the most ancient Roman language, which it collected and made use of. The same thing was about this time to a certain extent the case with the Greeks; and this may then have given rise to many a collection of glosses in Latin as well as in Greek: the abuse of it is shown in the Lexiphanes of Lucian. Apuleius and Tertullian, however, are men of the highest talent: Apuleius, who writes in a remarkably lively style, is undoubtedly to be placed among the first geniuses of his age. His Apology, in which the quaint expressions are not so heaped together as in the Metamorphoses, shows with what eloquence he could speak and write, so long as he did not strive to be over-refined. Old words which were becoming obsolete, are here and there to be met with even in Sallust and Tacitus, but very sparingly and without abuse: the later writers sow them broadcast. How the African school with all its peculiarities arose, is perhaps more than we can now tell; yet Carthage was in the western world so decidedly the second city after Rome, that one may easily understand, how in literature also it stood in marked opposition to it: there was very much the same difference which there is now between Paris and Geneva. In the provincial towns, like Madaura, Hippo, and others, Punic was still