"In the last years of Augustus," says the same writer, "the younger generation who were born, or at least grew up to manhood, after the commencement of the monarchy, were altogether different. We can already perceive the symptoms of declining taste--in Ovid particularly, who is overrun with an unhealthy superfluity of fancy, and a sentimental effeminacy of expression." Even History itself, in which the Romans so far excelled, yielded to the corrupting influence of the Cæsars. Tacitus concluded the long series of splendid and vigorous writers, and he grew up and was educated under the comparatively happy reigns of Vespasian and Titus, and wrote under the mild government of Nerva. Unnatural pomp and extravagance of expression seem, strange as it may appear, to be the necessary results of social and political degradation. And it is curious indeed to behold among the writers under the first Cæsars, the extraordinary compounds which genius can produce, when impelled on the one hand by the all-powerful and stimulating love of liberty, and vivid glimpses of the real dignity of human nature, while checked and subdued on the other by the fear of arbitrary power. Take Lucan for an example. "In him we find the most outrageously republican feelings making their chosen abode in the breast of a wealthy and luxurious courtier of Nero. It excites surprise and even disgust, to observe how he stoops to flatter that disgusting tyrant, in expressions the meanness of which amounts to a crime, and then in the next page, exalts Cato above the Gods themselves, and speaks of all the enemies of the first Cæsar with an admiration that approaches to idolatry." Let us now look for an exemplification of the same great truths, to the reign of Louis the fourteenth, a reign which has been celebrated as the zenith of warlike and literary splendor--and here I borrow the language of Macintosh. "Talent seemed robbed of the conscious elevation, of the erect and manly port, which is its noblest associate and its surest indication. The mild purity of Fenelon, the lofty spirit of Bossuet, the masculine mind of Boileau, the sublime fervor of Corneille, were confounded by the contagion of ignominious and indiscriminate servility." Purity, propriety and beauty of style, were indeed carried during this reign to a high pitch of perfection. The literature of this period was "the highest attainment of the imagination." An aristocratic society, such as that which adorned the court of Louis XIV, is particularly favorable to the delicacy and polish of style, the fascinations of wit and gaiety, and to all the decorations of an elegant imagination. No one has ever surpassed Racine, Fenelon, and Bossuet, in purity of style and elegance of language.