Roman
poetry down to its very close, when it is lost amidst the darkness of
the Middle Ages. Claudius Rutilius Namatianus, who flourished in the 5th
century, was a Gaul, and wrote a very fair piece culled the
"Itinerarium," describing a voyage from Rome to his native province.
Though inferior to his contemporary, Claudian, in genius, Rutilius
excels him in purity of diction and refinement of taste. At this period,
pure Latin was probably confined to the highest circles, the masses
already using that =eloquium vulgare= which later on formed the several
modern Romance Languages; hence Rutilius must have been in a sense a
classical antiquarian.

The end draws near. Compilers, grammarians, critics, commentators, and
encyclopaedists; summarising the past and quibbling over technical
minutiae; are the last survivors of a dying literature from whence
inspiration has already fled. Macrobius, a critic and grammarian of
celebrity, flourished in the fourth or fifth century, and interests us
as being one through knowledge of whose works Samuel Johnson first
attracted notice at Oxford. Priscian, conceded to be one of the
principal grammatical authorities of the Roman world, flourished about
the year 500. Isidorus Hispalensis, Bishop of Seville, grammarian,
historian and theologian, was the most celebrated and influential
literary character of the crumbling Roman fabric, save the philosopher
Boetius and the historian Cassiodorus, and was highly esteemed during
the Middle Ages, of which, indeed, he was as much a part, as he was a
part of expiring classicism.

Now falls the curtain. =Roma fuit.= At the time of Isidorus' death in
A. D. 636, the beginnings of mediaevalism were fully under way.
Authorship had disappeared in the broader sense; learning, such as it
was, had retired into the monasteries; whilst the populace of the
erstwhile Empire, living side by side with the invading barbarians, no
longer spoke a language justly to be called classical Latin. With the
revival of letters we shall see more Latin writings, but they will not
be Roman; for their authors will have new and strange idioms for their
mother-tongues, and will view life in a somewhat different manner. The
link of continuity will have been irreparably broken, and these revivers
will be Romans only in an artificial and antiquarian sense. He who calls
himself "Pomponius Laetus" will be found to have been baptised Pomponio
Leto. Classical antiquity, with its simple magn