Caius Crispus Sallustius, born fifteen years later than the great writer just noticed, and much inferior to him in harmony of arrangement and clearness of expression, yet had few equals among his countrymen as a writer. The beautiful historians of Greece were more easily copied than any other department of their letters, and this enabled the Romans to produce clever imitations. Thucydides was the model followed by Sallust, whose servility crippled the modicum of genius he originally possessed. Titus Livius was born B.C. 17, at Padua, and removed to Rome, where he enjoyed the protection and regard of Augustus. The gross materialism of Epicurus was most genial to the national sense, and received at their hands a general adoption. The same gloomy impress lies upon the pages of Livy, and we close his work with the feeling that we have been conducted through "a stately gallery of gay and tragic pictures." Battles and triumphs are delineated with circumstantial vividness; but little light is thrown upon the constitution of the immortal mind, nor is the information thus communicated conducive to healthful order or energy. Caius Cornelius Tacitus was born A.D. 57, forty-three years after the death of Augustus. His father is supposed to have been of the equestrian order, and Procurator of Belgian Gaul. Better auspices dawned when Trajan, the last of efficient Cæsars, ascended the throne, and like the sudden beauty which sometimes adorns the close of a lowering day, rivalled the greatness of old Rome. As his fitting co-operative in concluding the historic cycle of the Augustan age, Tacitus, educated under Vespasian and Titus, and who had learned to analyze his race under Domitian and Nerva, arose with Trajan to enjoy the last bright hour of his nation, and to portray the dreadfulness of the coming night. The depth of his spirit, and pungency of his expressions, are the last and best exponents of Augustan prose literature. What began with Cæsar in simple majesty, and was continued by Livy under the attractions of rhetorical extravagance, was by Tacitus garnered and uttered in the final expression of invincible victory and disdain. The historian of despotic cruelty threw the links of the world's fetters along the iron pages of his masterly Annals, while the shadows of Teutonic grandeur seem already gathering over his sad visage as he writes.