, which has fallen into financial disorder and requires
reorganisation. He possesses numerous estates and has many tenants to
deal with. He writes speeches, occasional poems, and a large number of
letters carefully phrased with a view to publication. His social or
complimentary duties are numerous and exacting. One day he goes out
hunting wild boar on one of his estates, and kills three of them. How,
think you, does he pass the time while the beaters are driving the
animals towards the net? He is thinking up a subject and making notes,
and actually finds the silence and solitude helpful. He concludes his
short letter on the subject by advising his friend "when you go
hunting, take my advice and carry your writing-tablets as well as your
luncheon-basket and flask: you will find that Minerva roams the hills
no less than Diana." Pliny the Younger is writing, it is true, a
generation after Nero, but there had been no appreciable change in
Roman intellectual tastes during that short interval.

The Roman may have had little inclination towards abstract thinking,
but he was not an idle-minded man. Even the emperors often cultivated
the muse. Nero we have seen, wrote verses, while his predecessor
Claudius bore a strangely near resemblance to our own James I., not
only in respect of his weakness of character, but also of his
pretensions to erudition and authorship. We can hardly read the
literature of this and the next half-century without being amazed at
the number of names of writers who gained or sought some share of
repute, although few of them have left works important enough to have
been kept alive till now. It is true that through all the writing of
this time there runs what has been called the "falsetto" note, a fact
which is due partly to the absence of live national questions or the
freedom to discuss them, and partly to the false principles of the
rhetorical training already described. The general desire was to show
cleverness, wide reading, and information; there was no impulse to
great creation or to exhibitions of profound feeling. Epigram and
"point" are no less compassed in the overstrained epic of Lucan, and
in the philosophic essays of Seneca, than in the satires of Persius.
It is probable that what have been called intellectual "interests"
were never more widely spread than in the _pax Romana_ of the first
and second centuries A.D. We gather from literature that books
innumerable were produced on subjects ofte