a Schiller, or their balladists, had followed the example of Frederick the Great and put themselves into as complete a pupilage to the models from France. There are instances in which the Latin genius did actually follow its own course after gathering technical lessons from the Greeks, and the result is then of such excellence that we cannot help feeling some regret at the prevalence of deliberate imitation. The most truly spontaneous, and therefore most creative, writers in Latin are Lucretius the philosophic poet, Catullus the lyrist, Juvenal the satirist, the letter-writers Cicero and Pliny, and the historians Caesar, Livy, and Tacitus. Of these Lucretius, Catullus, and Caesar are frank and genuine men with corresponding thoughts. They learn what Greece can teach in the way of form, and then set themselves to deliver their own souls. In letter-writing and in satire the native genius, strong in those directions, broke out without assistance. The first prevailing characteristic of Latin literature, then, is its deliberate secondariness, which too often goes with lack of serious purpose. The second consists in a remarkable zest for polish of expression, a studied elaboration of elegant diction and pointed phrase, which may recall in some cases Pope, in others Tennyson. Something of this is due to a necessarily disproportionate care for words in the absence of substantial or novel matter; something is also due to the constitutional Italian genius, which excels in cameo-cutting, whether in the literal or the metaphorical sense. Doubtless the ideal literature combines the exquisite expression with the original thought, but, if we must make some surrender, we should naturally prefer to leave the brilliancy in the thought. Latin writers, however, on the whole rather agreed with Boileau and Pope, that the aim of literature was to utter “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” The result with them is that the most famous of their poets are unsurpassable verbal artists, and that their silver age writers are in particular exceedingly deft in the command of terse and pointed phrase. But the result is also that their inferior writers were apt to become mere tricksters and contortionists in words. Nevertheless, it is one indefeasible ground of praise of the literature of Rome that it did thus set itself and us a high ideal in the way of melodious or compact and rememberable diction.