originality of invention, Latin literature might become a truer medium of Greek culture, and might, at the same time, impart a finer edge and temper to the rude ore of Latin speech. The task which awaited Terence was the complete Hellenising of Roman comedy, and the creation of a style which might combine something of Attic flexibility and delicacy with the idiomatic purity of the Latin spoken in the best Roman houses. By birth a Phoenician, by intellectual education a Greek, by the associations of his daily life a foreigner living in Rome, he was more in sympathy with the cosmopolitan mode of thought and feeling which Greek culture was diffusing over the civilised world, than with the traditions of Roman morality or the homely and genial humours of Italian life. As a dependent and associate of men belonging to the most select society of Rome, he had neither the contact with the many sides of life, nor the familiarity with the animated modes of popular speech, which helped to fashion the style of Plautus: but by assimilating the literary grace of the Athenian comedy and the familiar manner of a friendly, courteous, and active-minded society, he gave to Latin, what the Greek language in ancient and the French in modern times have had preeminently, a style which gives dignity and urbanity to conversation, and freedom and simplicity to literary expression. If the oratorical tastes and training of the Romans make the absence of these last qualities perceptible in much both of their prose and verse, we feel the charm of their presence in the Letters of Cicero, the lighter poems of Catullus, the Epistles of Horace, the Epigrams of Martial: and it was owing to the social and intellectual position of Terence that this secret of combining consummate literary grace with conversational ease and spontaneity was discovered. The biography of Terence written by Suetonius has been preserved in a complete state; so that in regard to the facts of his life, as of that of Horace and Virgil, we have ampler evidence than is afforded in the case of other writers, of whom the only external record is contained in the short summaries of Jerome. We are enabled to go back to the original and nearly contemporary authorities which Suetonius used in his work 'De viris illustribus.' But the result of this fuller information is to increase the distrust which some of the summaries in Jerome naturally arouse. The authorities are found to be inconsistent with one another in several important points. We find also proof that the grammarians and _littérateurs_ of the second century B.C. had a pleasure in chronicling the same kind of scandalous gossip which Suetonius has perpetuated in his lives of the Caesars, and his biographies of Virgil and Horace.