This Pliny has been described as the kindliest of Roman gentlemen, but he was far more than that. He was a noble example of the trained and cultured patrician, an ardent and industrious worker, an honest and honourable statesman of no mean ability,--very learned, ambitious only of political distinction when he felt that high rank and authority gave him ampler scope to serve his country and his fellows. He was, we learn from his own writings, by no means a solitary specimen of the chivalrous and noble men who did so much to build up the great Empire, and to render possible that far-reaching “Pax Romana” which for so many years gave prosperity and a fair amount of happiness to the world known under the immemorial name of Rome. What we know of Pliny and his friends goes far to modify the painful impressions of Roman society of the first two centuries which we gather from the pages of Juvenal and other writers, who have painted their pictures of Roman life in the first and second centuries of the Christian era in such lurid and gloomy colours. * * * * * It is in the “Letters of Pliny” that the real story of his life and work has come down to us. These letters are no ordinary or chance collection. They are a finished work of great deliberation and thought. About a century and a half earlier, the large collection of Cicero’s correspondence was given to an admiring and regretful world. A renowned statesman, a matchless orator, and even greater, the creator of the Latin language, which became a universal language--the Letters of Cicero set, as it were, a new fashion in literature. They were really the first in this special form of writing which at once became popular. The younger Pliny was a pupil of Quintilian, who was for a long period--certainly for twenty years--the most celebrated teacher in the capital. Quintilian is known as the earliest of the Ciceronians. The cult of Ciceronianism established by Quintilian, Pliny’s tutor, was the real origin of the wonderful Pliny Letters. Pliny was one of the ablest scholars of his age. He, like many of his countrymen, was ambitious of posthumous fame--he would not be forgotten. He was proud of his position--of his forensic oratory--of his statesmanship--of his various literary efforts; but he was too far-seeing to dream of any of his efforts in forensic oratory, or in the service of the State, or even in his various literary adventures which amused his leisure hours, winning him that posthumous fame which in common with so many other earnest pagan Romans he longed for.[22] Pliny was an ardent admirer of Cicero; but Cicero the statesman and the orator, he felt, moved on too high a plane for him to aim at emulating; but as a writer of Latin, as a chronicler of his own day and time, as a word-painter of the society in which he moved, he might possibly reach as high a pitch of excellence as Cicero had reached in his day.