are certainly not too long, and express most accurately, both in
sentiment and style, the characters of the great men to whom the author
assigns them. We have no hesitation in declaring that the speeches in the
Catiline and Jugurtha, as well as those extracted from the _Historiae_,
are the most precious specimens of the kind that have come down to us
from antiquity.

As regards the grammatical style and the imitation of earlier authors,
for which Sallust has been blamed by some, and praised by others, it must
be observed that he is the first among the classical authors extant in
whose works we perceive a difference between the refined language of
public life, such as we have it in Cicero and Caesar, and a new and
artificially-formed language of literature. Cicero and Caesar wrote just
as a well-educated orator of taste spoke: after the death of Caesar,
oratory began to withdraw from the active scenes of public life; and
there remained few authors who, following the practical vocation of an
orator, though at an unfavourable epoch, yet observed the principle
which is generally correct--that a man ought to write in the same manner
in which well-bred people speak. But most men of talent who devoted
themselves to written composition for the satisfaction of their own
minds, or for the instruction of their contemporaries, created for
themselves a new style, such as was naturally developed in them by
reading the earlier authors, and through their own relations to their
readers and not hearers. Livy clung to the language, style, and the
full-sounding period of the oratorical style, though even he in many
points deviated from the natural refinement of a Caesar and a Cicero;
but Sallust gave up the oratorical period, divided the long-spun,
full-sounding, and well-finished oratorical sentence into several short
sentences; and in this manner he seemed to go back to the ancients, who
had not yet invented the period: but still there was a great difference