but a man of tender heart and sympathies.

Pliny's tastes were catholic. He writes with delight, but without
pretending to be a connoisseur, of an antique statuette which he had
purchased out of a legacy. Some rich men in Rome had the mania for
antiques--Corinthian bronzes were the rage in Pliny's day--as badly as
those who haunt our modern sale-rooms. Pliny's hobby, if he had been
living in our time, would probably have been books. He is one of the
most bookish men of antiquity. Wherever he went his books went with
him; in his carriage, in his gardens they never left his side. He
betrays, moreover, a taste for the beauties of nature which is
distinctly un-Roman. Even the Roman poets were almost utterly oblivious
to the charms of scenery. When Horace points out of the window to the
snow lying deep on Soracte, it is not to emphasise the beauty of the
scene, but a preliminary to telling the boy to pile the logs of Algidus
upon the fire. Even Virgil, who occasionally paints a bit of landscape
or seascape in the Aeneid, does so in a half-hearted fashion, as a mere
preface to the incident which is to follow, not from a poet's love of
beauty. In Pliny, on the other hand, we find the modern love for a
beautiful view. Me nihil aeque ac natura opera delectant. When he
describes his Tuscan villa he uses language with which we feel in
complete harmony. He specifies the places from which the best views may
be obtained; and if the garden seems to our taste to have been laid out
in rather a formal way, with its box-trees cut into different shapes of
animals and birds, he was in that respect only following the fashion of
his day, and his delight in the unadorned beauties of the surrounding
country has a genuine ring in it. In another curious respect Pliny was
ahead of his times. He had no taste for the Circensian games and the
brutalities of the gladiatorial shows. Writing to Sempronius Rufus (iv.
22), he bluntly declares that he wishes they could be abolished in Rome,