translating passages from the Greek tragedians in his philosophical works. That he had no true poetical faculty is shown by the apparent indifference with which he regarded the works of the two great poets of his time. This indifference is the more marked from his generous recognition of the oratorical promise and accomplishment of the men of a younger generation. The tragedies of Q. Cicero were mere literary exercises and made no impression on his generation. Though several of the multifarious works of Varro were written in verse, yet the whole cast of his mind was thoroughly prosaic. His tastes and abilities were those of an antiquarian scholar, not of a man of poetic genius and accomplishment. The period of nearly half a century, from 102 till about 60 B.C., must thus be regarded as altogether barren in genuine poetical result. During this long interval there appeared no successor to carry on the work of developing the poetical side of a national literature, begun by Plautus, Ennius, and Lucilius. The only metrical compositions of this time were either inferior reproductions of the old forms or immature anticipations of the products of a later age. The political disturbance of the times between the tribunate of Tib. Gracchus and the first consulship of Crassus and Pompey (B.C. 70) was unfavourable to the cultivation of that poetry which is expressive of national feeling: and the Roman genius for art was as yet too immature to produce the poetry of individual reflection or personal passion. The state of feeling throughout Italy, before and immediately subsequent to the Social War, alienated from Rome the sympathetic genius of the kindred races from whom her most illustrious authors were drawn in later times. It was in the years of comparative peace, between the horrors of the first civil war and the alarm preceding the outbreak of the second, that a new poet grew apparently unnoticed to maturity, and the silence was at last broken after the long repression of Italian genius by a voice at once stronger in native vitality and richer in acquired culture than any which had preceded it.