The general taste was bad. Great Greek writers were wanting; and the Latin writers extant, except the satirist Persius, are of an ordinary type. Excessive declamation spoiled everything. The rule by which the public judged intellectual productions was nearly the same as it is now. Only brilliancy was looked for. Language ceased to be the simple vestment of thought, deriving all its elegance from its perfect adaptation to the idea sought to be expressed. Language began to be cultivated for its own sake. The aim of an author in his writings was to display his own talent. The excellence of a recitation or public reading was measured by the number of passages which excited applause. The cardinal principle that in art everything should serve as ornament, but that anything inserted expressly as ornament is bad, was entirely forgotten. It was a very literary period, as they say. Hardly anything was talked of but eloquence and style; and after all, nearly everybody wrote incorrectly, and there was not a solitary orator. The true orator and writer are not those who make speaking or writing their trade. At the theatre, the principal actor absorbed attention, and dramas were suppressed in order that brilliant passages might be recited. The literary fashion of the day was a silly _dilettantism_, a foolish vanity which led everybody to affect talent, and which did not stop short of the imperial throne. Hence extreme insipidity and interminable "Theseids," or dramas written to be read in literary circles; and hence a dreary desert of poetical commonplace, which can be compared only to the epics and classic tragedies of sixty years ago. Stoicism itself could not escape this disease, or at least it did not before Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius succeeded in clothing its doctrines in an elegant vesture. What strange productions are those tragedies of Seneca, in which the loftiest sentiments are expressed in the most wearisome style of literary quackery! indices at once of moral advancement and of an irremediable decline of taste. We are compelled to say the same of Lucan. The tension of mind which resulted naturally from the eminently tragic character of the epoch, gave rise to a species of inflation, in which state the only anxiety was to win applause by brilliant sentences. Something analogous to this happened amongst us during the Revolution; and the most terrible crisis which ever existed produced scarcely anything but a schoolmaster's literature, crammed with declamation. We must not, however, stop at this point. New ideas are sometimes expressed with much ostentation. The style of Seneca is sober, simple, and pure, in comparison with that of St. Augustine. But we forgive the latter his detestable style and insipid conceits, in return for his noble sentiments.