or, on a lower platform, the authors of collections like the
_Curiosities of Literature_ would have been quite at home in this
period: but it would have produced no Shakespeare, Milton, or
Wordsworth. The agreeable poem, the well-expressed essay, are the
approved reading for men of indolent bent: the informative collection
for the more curious, serious, or practical-minded. If the early
empire is "despotism tempered by epigram," it is perhaps not
altogether untrue that the contemporary literature was pedantry
tempered by epigram, or at least by quotation.

Science, though its matter was attractive enough to the practical
Roman, was at a standstill. So far as it existed it was Greek. The
Greeks had done almost all that could be done by sheer brain-power and
acumen. They could hardly proceed further without those finer
instruments which we possess, but which they did not. Though they knew
of certain magnifying glasses, they had no real telescopes or
microscopes, no mariner's compass or chronometers, no very delicate
balances. They possessed a magnificent thinking apparatus and put it
to admirable use. The modern scientist has generally nothing but
admiration for their keen insight, and for the brilliant hypotheses
which they invented and which were frequently but unverified
anticipations or partial anticipations of theories now in vogue. Where
they stopped short was at experiment in test of hypothesis. Of all
exploits of pure thinking in the domain of science perhaps the
greatest has been the conception that the earth, instead of being a
flat disk, is a sphere. This theory was held before the age of Nero by
ancient astronomers and geographers, who had derived the notion partly
from the eclipses of the moon--of which they well understood the
cause--and partly from the rising of objects above the horizon. They
understood also that in a sphere there was gravitation to the centre,
and were able so to comprehend the level surface of water on the
globe. The geographer Strabo, more than a generation before our chosen
date, readily conceives that, if one sailed straight westward out of
the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar, he would
ultimately come back round the world by way of the East--that is to
say, by India. It was not left for Columbus to invent that doctrine.
It is true that in calculating the circumference of the earth they had
made it as much as one-seventh too large, but the wonder is that they
came so n