he taste for eloquence that had once
produced great orators exhibited in the later centuries only finished
declaimers.

=Importance of the Latin Literature and Language.=--Latin literature
profited by the conquests of Rome; the Romans carried it with their
language to their barbarian subjects of the West. All the peoples of
Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, and the Danubian lands discarded their
language and took the Latin. Having no national literature, they
adopted that of their masters. The empire was thus divided between the
two languages of the two great peoples of antiquity: the Orient
continued to speak Greek; almost the entire Occident acquired the
Latin. Latin was not only the official language of the state
functionaries and of great men, like the English of our day in India;
the people themselves spoke it with greater or less correctness--in
fact, so well that today eighteen centuries after the conquest five
languages of Europe are derived from the Latin--the Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese, French, and Roumanian.

With the Latin language the Latin literature extended itself over all
the West. In the schools of Bordeaux and Autun in the fifth century
only Latin poets and orators were studied. After the coming of the
barbarians, bishops and monks continued to write in Latin and they
carried this practice among the peoples of England and Germany who
were still speaking their native languages. Throughout almost the
whole mediaeval period, acts, laws, histories, and books of science
were written in Latin. In the convents and the schools they read,
copied, and appreciated only works written in Latin; beside books of
piety only the Latin authors were known--Vergil, Horace, Cicero, and
Pliny the Younger. The renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries consisted partly in reviving the forgotten Latin writers.
More than ever it was the fashion to know and to imitate them.

As the Romans constructed a literature in imitation of the Greeks, the
moderns have taken the Latin writers for their models. Was this good
or bad? Who would venture to say? But the fact is indisputable. Our
romance languages are daughters of the Latin, our literatures are full
of the ideas and of the literary methods of the Romans. The whole
western world is impregnated with the Latin literature.

THE ARTS

=Sculpture and Painting.=--Great numbers of Roman statues and
bas-reliefs of the time of the empire have come to light. Some are
reprod