subject on which he wrote.

HORACE.--Horace was a man of infinite wit, profoundly conversant with the
Grecian poets. With that knowledge of the poets he filled his odes with
recollections of Alcasus and Stesichorus; they were minutely and finely
polished, accustoming the Romans to find in Latin words the musical
phrases of the Greeks, but withal remaining very cold. With his wit, his
verve, his very lively sense of humour, his pretty moral philosophy
borrowed a little from the Stoics but mainly from the Epicureans, he
created his _Satires_ and his _Epistles_, which form the most
delicate feast and which have no more lost their interest for us than
Montaigne has. Here was a charming man. He was not a great poet. He was
the most witty of poets, the poet of the men of wit.

TIBULLUS; PROPERTIUS; OVID.--Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid immediately
followed him. Tibullus was a tender and sad elegiast, less passionate and
less powerful than Catullus, but gracious and touching. All the elegiacal
poets, and Andre Chenier in particular, have evinced recollections of
him. Propertius possessed great talent for versification, but was more
erudite than inspired; being almost pure Alexandrine, he is more
interesting to the humourist than to the ordinary man. Ovid, gifted with
facility and the skill of a prodigious versifier, dexterous descriptist
in his _Metamorphoses_, ingenious and cold in his _Art of
Love_, has found some pathetic notes in his elegies wherein as an
exile he weeps over his own misfortunes.

DECADENCE.--With the second century arrived the commencement of
decadence. The rhetoricians, who in Rome were what the sophists were in
Athens, only far less intelligent, directed the public mind. They did
not spoil it completely, but they did not give it strength, and the