Reading is the rendering of poetic or prose productions without stumbling or hesitancy. It must be done with due regard to expression, prosody, and pauses. From the expression we learn the merit of the piece, from the prosody the art of the reader, and from the pauses the meaning intended to be conveyed. In this way we read tragedy heroically, comedy conversationally, elegiacs thrillingly, epics sustainedly, lyrics musically, and dirges softly and plaintively. Any reading done without due observance of these rules degrades the merits of the poets and makes the habits of readers ridiculous.--_Id._ Some arts are common, others liberal.... The liberal arts, which some call the logical arts, are astronomy, geometry, music, philosophy, medicine, grammar, rhetoric.--_Scholia to Dionysius Thrax._ It is obvious that man excels the other animals in worth and speech: Why may we not hold that his worth consists as much in eloquence as in reason?--Quintilian. The civil man, and he who is truly wise, who does not devote himself to idle disputes, but to the administration of the commonwealth (from which those folks who are called philosophers have farthest withdrawn themselves), will be glad to employ every available oratorical means to reach his ends, having previously settled in his own mind what ends are honorable.--_Id._ If we count over all the epochs of life, we shall find its pains far more numerous than its pleasures.... The first, that of babyhood, is trying. The baby is hungry; the nurse sends it to sleep: it is thirsty; she washes it: it wants to go to sleep; she takes a rattle and makes a noise. When the child has escaped from the nurse, it is taken hold of by the pedagogue, the physical trainer, the grammar-master, the music-master, the drawing-master. In process of time, there are added the arithmetic-master, the geometer, the horse-breaker; he rises early; he has no chance for leisure. He becomes a cadet; again he has to fear the drill-master, the physical trainer, the fencing-master, the gymnasiarch. By all these he is whipt, watched, throttled. He graduates from the cadets at twenty; again he dreads and watches captain and general, etc.--Teles the Stoic (B.C. 260). The palmy period in the history of Rome is the period when she had no literature. It was only when the Roman nationality began to break up, and cosmopolitan Greek tendencies to lay hold upon the people, that a literature began to appear. For this reason, Roman literature from its very inception is, from absolute necessity, filled with the Greek spirit, and stands in the most direct opposition to the national spirit of the people.--Mommsen. Quintiliane, vagæ moderator summe juventæ, Gloria Romanæ, Quintiliane, togæ.--Martial.