language, a language always and increasingly artificial. While the
learned dialect was yearly becoming more and more barbarously
pedantic, the colloquial idiom, on the other hand, offered a thousand
chance-tost gems of racy or picturesque expression, rejected or at
least ungathered by what claimed to be classical Latin. The time was
coming when neither the pedants nor the people would really
understand Cicero; though there were some indeed, like this new
writer, Apuleius, who, departing from the custom of writing in Greek,
which had been a fashionable affectation among the sprightlier wits
since the days of Hadrian, had written in the vernacular.

The literary programme which Flavian had already designed for himself
would be a work, then, partly conservative or reactionary, in its
dealing with the instrument of the literary art; partly popular and
revolutionary, asserting, so to term them, the rights of the
proletariate of speech. More than fifty years before, the younger
Pliny, himself an effective witness for the delicate power of the
Latin tongue, had said,--"I am one of those who admire the ancients,
yet I do not, like some others, underrate certain instances of genius
which our own times afford. For it is not true that nature, as if
weary and effete, no longer produces what is admirable." And he,
Flavian, would prove himself the true master of the opportunity thus
indicated. In [96] his eagerness for a not too distant fame, he
dreamed over all that, as the young Caesar may have dreamed of
campaigns. Others might brutalise or neglect the native speech, that
true "open field" for charm and sway over men. He would make of it a
serious study, weighing the precise power of every phrase and word,
as though it were precious metal, disentangling the later
associations and going back to the original and native sense of
each,--restoring to full significance all its wealth of latent