the heroes of tragedy should be neither very good nor very bad, but rather a mixture of great virtues and great faults. But the poets of the late period, making use of the idea originated by philosophers, formed a "heroism of virtue": a heroism which may be called "gallant." Accordingly they either invented entirely new legends or else used old legends which had originally presented themselves to the founders of the nation in an appropriately stern and severe form, but softened them by adapting them to the softening of manners. Equally gallant is the "shepherd" of the Greek Bucolic poets, Bion and Moschus, "wasting away with the most delicate love," He makes the general observation on Greek and Latin literature, that the boundary between verse and prose was so strictly guarded on both sides that no ancient writer ever composed both orations and poems--a rule to which perhaps the only exception is the wretched verses (_ridenda poemata_) of Cicero: and Vico tried to explain this fact by the democratic habits which compelled orators studiously to avoid the cultivation of lofty and fanciful modes of expression, which would have puzzled the people and hindered their full and clear comprehension of the point at issue. Vico does not treat Roman literature so fully as Greek, which provided him with much more primitive documents. But he detected certain analogies between the origins of Latin and Greek literature. The first poets and authors in the Latin language were the Salii, sacred poets; and this was natural in the beginning of a nation's culture; for in the primitive religious period the gods are the only object of praise. And just as the earliest fragments of Latin known to us, the remains of the hymns of the Salii, give an impression of hexameter verse, so the same metre is felt in the records of Romans who celebrated triumphs, such as the _"duello magno dirimendo, regibus subiugandis"_ of Lucius Aemilius Regillus and the _"fudit fugat prosternit maximas legiones"_ of Acilius Glabrio. The first Roman poets, too, sang true stories: this was the case with Livius Andronicus and his Romanid containing the annals of early Rome, and with Naevius, and later Ennius, who described the Punic wars. Satire also was levelled against real and for the most part notorious persons. The Romans however differed from the Greeks in advancing with a more measured step and not making the swift and abrupt transition from barbarism to effeminacy: so that they entirely lost the history of their gods (which Varro called the "obscure period" of Rome) and preserved their heroic history, extending down to the Publilian and Petelian laws, in common speech only. In its greatest manifestations the literature of Rome is the work of cultivated poets like Virgil, whom Vico admires for his profound knowledge of heroic antiquity, but says of him that so far as poetical power is concerned he is not to be compared with Homer; a verdict agreeing with that of