oratorical breadth, and incredible vigour as colourist, the gift of verse
cast in medallions and also the gift of energetic metallic sonorousness.
Victor Hugo, in the satiric portion of his work, not merely drew
inspiration from but seemed saturated with him.

THE TRAJAN EPOCH.--now came the Trajan epoch. Quintilian, in elegant
fashion, with point and rather affected graces, taught us excellent
rhetoric full of sense and taste. Pliny the Younger, gentle and gay,
honest and amusing, pleaded as an insinuating orator, and, under the
pretext of _Letters_ to his friends, wrote essays of amiable
morality which evoke recollections of Montaigne.

TACITUS.--Tacitus is a great psychological historian and moralist. He is,
as Racine observed, "the greatest painter of antiquity," and Racine meant
the greatest painter of portraits. He possessed an entirely fresh style
of his own creation: nervous, articulate, coloured, concise, with brief
metaphors which reveal not only a poet, but a fine poet, in the vein of
Michelet, but with the difference of febrility to the potent discharge of
power.

AULUS GELLIUS; APULEIUS.--Under Marcus Aurelius Latin literature fell
into decay. Aulus Gellius was only a rather untidy or at least not very
methodical scholar who wrote feebly; Apuleius with his _Golden Ass_
was merely a fantastic romancist, very complex, curious about everything,
more especially with regard to singularities, lively, amusing, mystical
at times; in short, distinctly disconcerting.

WRITERS ON CHRISTIANITY.--Christianity was at an adult age. There were
writers of importance and some who were really great; the energetic and
violent Tertullian, beloved by Bossuet; Saint Cyprian, full of unction,