duty to support and encourage the budding literary ambition of a young aspirant of their set. Some sincere lovers of literary art would be drawn by a genuine interest and a wish to maintain the literary tradition, which was already betraying signs of weakness and decay. But, to a great many, this duty, added to the endless round of other social obligations, was evidently becoming repulsive and wearisome.(987) Pliny could listen with delight and admiration to Sentius Augurinus reciting his poems for three long days.(988) He would calmly expect his own friends to listen for as many days to a whole volume of his poems, or to his _Panegyric_ on Trajan.(989) Such was his high breeding, his kindliness, and such was his passion for literature in any form or of any quality, that he could hardly understand how what to him seemed at once a pleasure and duty should be regarded by others as an intolerable nuisance. The conduct of such people is treated with some disdain in one or two of the rare passages in which he writes of his circle with any severity. Some of these fashionable folk, after lingering in some place of gossip until the reading was well advanced, would enter the hall with ostentatious reluctance, and then leave before the end. Others, with an air of superiority, would sit in stolid silence and disguise the slightest expression of interest. This seemed to Pliny, not only grossly bad manners, but also neglect of a literary duty.(990) The audience should not only encourage honest effort; they should contribute their judgment to the improvement of style. Pliny, like Aristotle, has an immense faith in the collective opinion of numbers, even in matters of artistic taste.(991) He used to read his own pieces to successively wider circles, each time receiving suggestions for amendment. Many of Pliny’s Letters, like the dialogue _De Oratoribus_, reveal the keenness with which in those days questions of style were debated. But, as in the circle of Sidonius, this very energy of criticism was perhaps due to a dim consciousness of waning force.(992) Pliny, with all his kindly optimism, lets fall a phrase here and there which betrays an uneasiness about the future of letters.(993) Enthusiasm is failing. Nay, there is a hardly veiled contempt for that eager mediocrity which Pliny and Titinius Capito made it a point of honour to encourage. We feel that we are on the edge of that arid desert of cultivated impotence in which the freshness and vigour of Roman literature was soon mysteriously to disappear.