and culture, and the enthusiasm for Latin poetry, which expresses itself partly by means of a peculiar skill in versification and brilliancy of colouring, partly in bitter mockery of the affectations of contemporary poets and their dull, spiritless, and senseless exaggerations. The poet always preserves elegance and purity of language; when he goes out of his way to attain it, his good taste preserves him from errors, and that same taste also disclosed to him the cause and effect of the decline of rhetoric. Only one quality is wanting in Petronius; like the Casanova literature of our own and the preceding century, his work has no moral purpose. Æsop’s fables were now also put into Latin, for Phædrus, often without a complete understanding of the original, in somewhat clumsy verses and with feeble wit, arranged the Greek fables for school and home use amongst the Romans. The satirical point of the different pieces is now almost entirely incomprehensible to us in our ignorance of conditions in the city of Rome. The lyric proper was far the most popular form of poetry under the empire; for every one thought himself called upon to write songs and occasional verses. We gain some notion of this style of poetry from Horace. In his poems he chronicles the political measures of Augustus as well as the love affairs and social doings of himself and his friends. But whilst in the accounts of the latter it is frequently impossible to decide how much is fact, how much poetry, and, at times, imitation of his Greek models,--since so little true life beats through them,--in the former there is something at least which is in harmony with its subject. The poet has a firm and strong feeling for the greatness and honour of Rome, if perhaps he does not always see it in the true light; this gives some of his poems a colouring of truth and of a deep, sincere feeling. Dependence on the Greeks of the best age could scarcely have been greater; in diction and versification he is most careful; but that subtle relation between the language and the sense, which was indispensable in the Greek models, has been abandoned; tricks of versification have determined the form and expression more frequently than poetic impulse and spontaneous feeling.