Least of all were the Romans successful in tragedy, that noblest form of literary composition, and in which the Greeks most excelled. True, those specimens which were anciently regarded as the best, such as the Medea of Ovid, and the Thyestes of Varius, are not now extant; but all that does remain is stamped with the manners of a people too frivolous and vitiated to render tragedy either dignified or interesting. Their taste and talents were fitted only to produce and relish representations of low comedy. But here, too, as in every other walk, they were radically defective as to original merit, many of their comedies being nothing better than free translations from the Greek. Plautus is infected with all the faults of Aristophanes, and is vastly inferior in the pungency of his wit; though his plots may be more natural, and his talents have a less malicious design. The minor epic poets failed still more egregiously, both as to the sentiments ascribed to their heroes, and the modes of their expression. Ovid is frequently puerile to the last degree; and Lucan labors continually after the happy turn of an epigram, but seldom with success. Claudian and Statius are habitually bombastic, but never sublime; and their successors sunk even lower the depressed level of cotemporary worth. The Augustan age, in its best period, was in some respects like a well-cultivated garden, full of choice exotics, but containing little of natural growth; an assemblage of beauties, gathered from various regions, and sometimes grouped with an approach to elegance. In the age of Augustus, there were a moderately large number of literati, but few patrons; Mecænas stood first and alone; even the emperor himself was second. The Romans possessed the means of greatly enlarging the field of human knowledge, and the elder Pliny, artificial as he was, indicated how well those means might have been employed. But that people were utterly defective as to simplicity of life, and could not, therefore, excel in the more natural forms of literature. Theocritus, whose genius was Grecian, infused much beauty into his pastorals, and left small room for novelty to his successor, Virgil. The latter gave little attention to the real life of shepherds, and wrote eclogues, highly finished in manner, but in substance, quite unnatural. That author, like all his compeers, lived too much in an artificial world, and was too conversant with corrupt courts, and splendid dissipations, to admire unadorned beauty, and out of it to coin literary delights to nourish and exalt the sons of purity and peace. And yet it was in didactic poetry the Romans were most successful. The Georgics of Virgil, and the poetical dogmatics of Lucretius, display the opened treasures of, perhaps, the only original mine Latins ever worked.