something of his principles to the service of Rome--and of himself. It is not necessary to regard him as wholly disinterested in his conduct; it is unjust and absurd to regard him as a glorified Tartuffe.[152] Such a supposition is adequately refuted by his writings. It is easy for a writer at once so fluent and so brilliant to give the impression of insincerity; but the philosophical works of Seneca ring surprisingly true. We cannot doubt his faith, though his life may at times have belied it. He reveals a warmth of human feeling, a richness of imagination, a comprehension of human failings and sorrows, that make him rank high among the great preachers of the world. Even here, it is true, he has his failings; he repeats himself, has little constructive talent, and fails at times to conceal a passion for the obvious beneath the brilliance of his epigram. But alike in the spheres of politics and literature he is the greatest man of his age. In literature he stands alone: he is a prose Ovid, with the saving gift of moral fervour. His style is terse and epigrammatic, but never obscure; it lacks the roll of the continuous prose of the Augustan age, but its phrases have a beauty and a music of their own: at their best they are touched with a genuine vein of poetry, at their worst they have a hard brilliance against the attractions of which only the most fastidious eye is proof. He towered over all his contemporaries. In him were concentrated all the excellences of the rhetorical schools of the day. Seneca became the model for literary aspirants to copy. But he was a dangerous model. His lack of connexion and rhythm became exaggerated by his followers, and the slightest lack of dexterity in the imitator led to a flashy tawdriness such as Seneca himself had as a rule avoided. He was too facile and careless a composer to yield a canon for style. The reaction came soon. Involved, whether justly or not, in the Pisonian conspiracy of 65 A.D., he was forced to commit suicide. He died as the Stoics of the age were wont to die, cheerfully, courageously, and with self-conscious ostentation.[153] Within a few years of his death the great Ciceronian reaction headed by Quintilian began. The very vehemence with which the Senecan style was attacked, now by Quintilian[154] and later by Fronto,[155] shows what a commanding position he held. He was poet as well as philosopher. Quintilian tells us that he left scarcely any branch of literature untouched. 'We possess,' he says, 'his speeches, poems, letters, and dialogues.'[156] Two collections of poems attributed to Seneca have come down to us, a collection of epigrams and a collection of dramas. There is strangely little external evidence to support either attribution, but in neither case can there be any serious doubt as to the general correctness of the tradition.