special title of Legate Propraetor with full Consular powers, and he
remained in his province for at least fifteen months. After that the
curtain falls. Whether he died in Bithynia, or shortly after his return
to Rome, or whether he lived on to enjoy the ripe old age of which he
writes so pleasantly in his letters, we do not know. Certainly the
probabilities are that, if he had lived, he would have continued to
correspond with his friends, and the absence of further letters makes
for the probability that he died in about his fiftieth year.

In judging these letters for their literary value, the first thing which
strikes the reader is that Pliny did not write for his friends alone.
Whatever the subject of the epistle, whether it was an invitation to
dinner, a description of the charms of the country, an account of a
visit to a friend, or an expression of condolence with some one in his
or her bereavement, he never allowed his pen to run on carelessly. He
scarcely ever prattles in his letters or lets himself go. One always
sees in the writer the literary man, who knows that his correspondence
is being passed round from hand to hand, and who hopes that it will find
readers among posterity. Consequently there is an air of studied
artificiality about many of the letters, which was more to the taste of
the eighteenth than the nineteenth century. They remind one in many
ways of Richardson and Mackenzie, and Pliny would have been recognised
by those two writers, and by the latter in particular, as a thorough
"man of sentiment." Herein they differ greatly from the other important
collection which has come down to us from classical times, the Letters
of Cicero. Pliny, indeed,--and in this he was a true disciple of his
old teacher Quintilian,--took the great Roman orator as his model.
Nothing pleased him more than for his friends to tell him that he was
the Cicero of his time. Like Marcus Tullius, he was the foremost
pleader of his day; like him again he dabbled in poetry, and his verses,