arts made any appearance; and very
long before they took root or flourished to any degree. Poetry was the
first that did so; but such a poetry as one might expect among a
warlike, busied, unpolished people.

Not to enquire about the songs of triumph mentioned even in Romulus's
time, there was certainly something of poetry among them in the next
reign, under Numa; a Prince who pretended to converse with the Muses as
well as with Egeria, and who might possibly himself have made the verses
which the Salian priests sang in his time. Pythagoras, either in the
same reign, or if you please some time after, gave the Romans a
tincture of poetry as well as of philosophy; for Cicero assures us that
the Pythagoreans made great use of poetry and music; and probably they,
like our old Druids, delivered most of their precepts in verse. Indeed,
the chief employment of poetry in that and the following ages, among the
Romans, was of a religious kind. Their very prayers, and perhaps their
whole liturgy, was poetical. They had also a sort of prophetic or sacred
writers, who seem to have written generally in verse; and were so
numerous that there were above two thousand of their volumes remaining
even to Augustus's time. They had a kind of plays too, in these early
times, derived from what they had seen of the Tuscan actors when sent
for to Rome to expiate a plague that raged in the city. These seem to
have been either like our dumb-shows, or else a kind of extempore
farces--a thing to this day a good deal in use all over Italy and in
Tuscany. In a more particular manner, add to these that extempore kind
of jesting dialogues begun at their harvest and vintage feasts, and
carried on so rudely and abusively afterwards as to occasion a very
severe law to restrain their licentiousness; and those lovers of poetry
and good eating, who seem to have attended the tables of the richer
sort, much like the old provincial poets, or our own British bards, and
sang there to some instrument of music the achievements of their
ancestors, and the noble deeds of those who had gone before them, to
inflame others to follow their great examples.

[Illustration: ANCIENT ROMAN SHOES.]

[Illustration: ANCIENT ROMAN TORCHES.]

[Illustration: ANCIENT ROMAN DRINKING-BOTTLE.]

[Illustration: ANCIENT ALABASTER BOX.]

The names of almost all these poets sleep in peace with all their works;
and, if we may take the word of the other Roman writers of a better
age, it