with this literature are numerous, it will be convenient to say
something of the Latin literature in a preliminary sketch.

The Latin literature with which we are best acquainted was the result of
study and imitation of Greek literature. But the old vernacular Latin
was a homely and simple speech, much more like any modern language in
its ways and movements than would be supposed by those who only know
classical Latin. The old Latin poetry was rhythmical, and fond of
alliteration. Such was the native song of the Italian Camenæ, unlike the
æsthetic poetry of the classical age, with its metres borrowed from the
Greek Muses. The old Latin poetry was like the Saxon, in so far as it
was rhythmical and not metrical; but unlike it in this, that the Latin
alliteration was only a vague pleasure of recurrent sound, and it had
not become a structural agency like the alliteration of Saxon poetry.
The book through which juvenile students usually get some taste of old
Latin is Terence, in whose plays, though they are from Greek originals,
something is heard of that rippling movement which has lived through the
ages and still survives in Italian conversation. Reaching backwards from
Terence we come to Plautus and Ennius, and then to Nævius (B.C.
274-202), who composed an epic on the first Punic war. He lamented even
in his time the Grecising of his mother-tongue. He wrote an epitaph upon
himself, to say that if immortals could weep for mortals, the Camenæ
might well weep for Nævius, the last representative of the Latin
language.

The splendour of classical Latin was short-lived. The time of its
highest elevation is called the Golden Age, of which the early period is
marked by the names of Cicero and Cæsar; the latter (the Augustan
period) by the names of Virgil and Horace. There is a fine forward
movement in Cicero, who studied the best Greek models; but gradually