While the literature and civilisation of Greece were still unknown to them, the Romans had produced certain rude kinds of metrical composition; they preserved some knowledge of their history in various kinds of chronicles or annals: they must have been trained to some skill in oratory by the contests of public life, and by the practice of delivering commemorative speeches at the funerals of famous men. But they cannot be said to have produced spontaneously any works of literary art. Their oratory, history, poetry, and philosophy owed their first impulse to their intellectual contact with Greece. And while the form and expression of all Roman literature were moulded by the teaching of Greek masters and the study of Greek writings, the debt incurred by the poetry and philosophy of Rome was greater than that incurred by her oratory and history. The two latter assumed a more distinct type, and adapted themselves more naturally to the genius of the people and the circumstances of the State. They were the work of men for the most part eminent in the State; and they bore directly on the practical wants of the times in which they were cultivated. Even the structure of the Latin language testifies to the oratorical force and ardour by which it was moulded into symmetry; as the language of Greece betrays the plastic and harmonising power of her early poetry. There is no improbability in the supposition that, if Greek literature had never existed, or had remained unknown to the Romans, the political passions and necessities of the Republic would have called forth a series of powerful orators; and that the national instinct, which clung with such strong tenacity to the past, would, with the advance of power and civilisation, have produced a type of history, capable of giving adequate expression to the traditions and continuous annals of the commonwealth.