is, moreover, believed that when the Romans came into possession of Sicily, Theocritus was yet living. Many of the most creative minds in the conquered provinces now began to reside at Rome, bringing art and cultivation with them; and from this period literature in the metropolis assumed somewhat of a regular and connected form. The great majority of the citizens undervalued and even despised devotion to sedentary and contemplative pursuits. They were ambitious, and lived for conquest; but it was the extension of political domination they strove for, not the enlargement of literary renown. The old Roman was charmed by the glory of his country abroad, and the wise administration of her constitution at home. Military prowess was the foundation and guarantee of both, so that beyond politics and war he felt little concern. He was susceptible to every thing that related to success in arms; but exercises of a purer mental cast, even the most exciting, such as tragedy, never captivated the feelings nor acquired an influence over the mass of the people, as was universal in Greece. Amid the dust and destruction of perpetual conflict, learning was but a sickly plant, and it required all the artificial heat of courtly patronage to bring any thing to maturity. Accius was patronized by D. Brutus; Ennius by Lucilius and the Scipios; Terence by Africanus and Lælius; Lucretius by the Memmii; Tibullus by Messala; Propertius by Ælius Gallus; Virgil and his friends by Augustus, Mæcenas, and Pollio; Martial and Quintilian by Domitian. But, with the utmost adventitious aid, Roman literature, which never appeared greatly to deserve the epithet national, was of the rudest and most meagre description, and should be divided into three periods. The first period was dramatic; the second, prosaic; and the third, rhetorical. All the acting tragedy ever produced by Romans was limited to the first period; also the comedies of Plautus and Terence, the only works which have survived to claim admiration in modern times. It was the era of life, when all the vigorous germs of after growth were started. Epic poetry, rugged and monotonous as it was, yet then had a partial development, simultaneously with the first composition of national annals, and the foundation of accurate and thoughtful jurisprudence. It was also in that primary period that C. Gracchus became the father of Latin prose; but the language of the first great orator of western democracy under Italian skies was yet very inferior to the impassioned and noble sentiments it conveyed.