n as special and minute as
those selected for a German thesis, and that almost every town worth
the name, at least in the Greek-speaking part of the empire, produced
an author of sorts. But when we look into the symposia or chat of
Plutarch or Aulus Gellius, we cannot fail to note that a large
proportion of this intellectual and literary activity was being
frittered away on questions either stereotyped and threadbare, or of
no appreciable utility either to knowledge or conduct. As for
dilettante production at Rome itself Pliny remarks in one letter:
"This year has produced a large crop of poets: there was scarcely a
day in the whole month of April on which some one did not give a
reading." During the generation into which Nero was born and that
which followed him, we meet with no great creative work in either
prose or poetry, no great contribution to the progress of science or
thought. The most generally interesting writer of the whole period was
the Greek Plutarch, but though the _Parallel Lives_ which he was
preparing are immortal in their kind, and though his _Moral Essays_
are often most excellent reading, it cannot be said that he is a
profound original thinker or a creator of anything more than a taking
literary form. Next to him in value, earlier in date, stands Seneca,
who, like Plutarch, is a lively thinker and a deft essayist, with the
same love for a quotation and the same wide interests, but assuredly
not a considerable enlarger of the field of human thought. To those
who know Montaigne, the best notion of Seneca and Plutarch will be
formed by remembering that his essays are admitted by himself to be
"wholly compiled of what I have borrowed from them." The elder Pliny
supplies us with extracts and summaries of the knowledge or the
notions then extant, and we have writings on agriculture by Columella.
The youthful and rather awkward satirist Persius sees the life which
he criticises rather through the medium of books than through his own
eyes. Such works of the period as have gained any kind of immortality
are certainly interesting and often instructive, but they indicate a
period in which reading is chiefly cultivated amusement, and knowledge
rather sought as a pastime and an accomplishment than as a power. The
favourite reading must contain matter or sense, not too deep or
exacting; and it must possess a style. Perhaps writers as various as
Dryden, Pope, Horace Walpole, Samuel Johnson, De Quincey, Macaulay,