hen proconsul in Bithynia under Trajan, and follow the
extraordinary details of administration which, with ten thousand others,
the Spanish Emperor of Rome carried in his memory, and directed and
decided. Take Petronius Arbiter's 'novel' next, the Satyricon, if you be
not over-delicate in taste, and glance at the daily journal of a
dissolute wretch wandering from one scene of incredible vice to another.
And so on, through the later writers; and from among the vast annals of
the industrious Muratori pick out bits of Roman life at different
periods, and try to piece them together. At first sight it seems utterly
impossible that one and the same people should have passed through such
social changes and vicissitudes. Every educated man knows the main
points through which the chain ran. Scholars have spent their lives in
the attempt to restore even a few of the links and, for the most part,
have lost their way in the dry quicksands that have swallowed up so
much.

'I have raised a monument more enduring than bronze!' exclaimed Horace,
in one of his rare moments of pardonable vanity. The expression meant
much more then than it does now. The golden age of Rome was an age of
brazen statues apparently destined to last as long as history. Yet the
marble outlasted the gilded metal, and Horace's verse outlived both, and
the names of the artists of that day are mostly forgotten, while his is
a household word. In conquering races, literature has generally attained
higher excellence than painting or sculpture, or architecture, for the
arts are the expression of a people's tastes, often incomprehensible to
men who live a thousand years later; but literature, if it expresses
anything, either by poetry, history, or fiction, shows the feeling of
humanity; and the human being, as such, changes very little in twenty or
thirty centuries. Achilles, in his wrath at being robbed of the lovely
Briseis, brings the age of Troy nearer to most men in its living
vitality than the matchless Hermes of Olympia can ever bring the century
of Greece's supremacy. One line of Catullus makes his time more alive
today than the huge mass of the Colosseum can ever make Titus seem. We
see the great stones piled up to heaven, but we do not see the men who
hewed them, and lifted them, and set them in place. The true poet gives
us the real man, and after all, men are more important than stones. Yet
the work of men's hands explains the working of men's hearts, telling