of the forest.

The dramatists wove effective metaphors and descriptions of Nature
into their plays.

Lucretius laid the foundations of a knowledge of her which refined
both his enjoyment and his descriptions; and the elegiac sentimental
style, which we see developed in Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Virgil,
and Horace, first came to light in the great lyrist Catullus. In
Imperial times feeling for Nature grew with the growth of culture in
general; men turned to her in times of bad cheer, and found comfort
in the great sky spaces, the constant stars, and forests that
trembled with awe of the divine Numen.

It was so with Seneca, a pantheist through and through. Pliny the
younger was quite modern in his choice of rural solitudes, and his
appreciation of the views from his villa. With Hadrian and Apuleius
the Roman rococo literature began; Apuleius was astonishingly modern,
and Ausonius was almost German in the depth and tenderness of his
feeling for Nature. Garden-culture and landscape-painting shewed the
same movement towards the sympathetic and elegiac-sentimental.

Those who deny the Roman feeling for Nature might learn better from a
glance at the ruins of their villas. As H. Nissen says in his
_Italische Landeskunde_:

'It was more than mere fashion which drew the Roman to the sea-side,
and attracted so strongly all those great figures, from the elder
Scipio Africanus and his noble daughter, Cornelia, down to Augustus
and Tiberius and their successors, whenever their powers flagged in
the Forum. There were soft breezes to cool the brow, colour and
outline to refresh the eye, and wide views that appealed to a race
born to extensive lordship.

'In passing along the desolate, fever-stricken coasts of Latium and
Campania to-day, one comes upon many traces of former splendour, and
one is reminded that the pleasure which the old Romans took in the
sea-side was spoilt for those who came after them by the havoc of the
time.'

In many points, Roman feeling for Nature was more developed than
Greek. For instance, the Romans appreciated landscape as a whole, and
distance, light and shade in wood and water, reflections, the charms
of hunting and rowing, day-dreams on a mountain side, and so forth.

That antiquity and the Middle Ages had any taste for romantic scenery
has been energetically denied; but we can find a trace of it. The
landscape which the Roman admired was level, graceful, and gentle; he
certainly did not se