period, and as it was an ordinary school subject under the empire, the
language of the law books exercised great influence in the formation of
the prose style that continued through the Middle Ages.

We now come to the new Latin literature with which we are intimately
concerned.

By the side of this diminished stream of the elder literature there
rose, after the middle of the second century, a new series of writings,
new in subject, and new also in manner, diction, and spirit. The
phraseology is less literary, and more taken from the colloquial speech
and the usage of everyday life. It seems also to be, in some measure,
the return-language of a colony: some of the earliest and most important
contributions come from Africa, where Latin was now the mother-tongue of
a large population, and that country appears to have escaped the ravages
of the plague.

The first of these books is one that still bears considerable traces of
classicism. It is entitled "Octavius," and is an apology for
Christianity by Minucius Felix. But immediately after him we come upon a
chief representative of this new literature, which aimed less at form
than at the conveying of the author's meaning in the readiest and most
familiar words. This is strikingly the case with the direct and
unstudied Latinity of the first of the Latin fathers, the African
Tertullian, in whom the contrast with classicism is most pronounced. In
him the old conventional dignity gives place to the free display of
personal characteristics, and no writer (it has been said) affords a
better illustration of the saying of Buffon--"the style is the man."

Another African writer was Lactantius, to whom has been attributed that