raged; and along the vast surface of the Roman empire there was
perhaps a greater number whose minds were cultivated by intellectual
discipline than under the more brilliant reign of the first emperor.

[Sidenote: Its causes.]

It is not, I think, very easy to give a perfectly satisfactory solution
of the rapid downfall of literature between the ages of Antonine and of
Diocletian. Perhaps the prosperous condition of the empire from Trajan
to Marcus Aurelius, and the patron age which those good princes bestowed
on letters, gave an artificial health to them for a moment, and
suspended the operation of a disease which had already begun to
undermine their vigour. Perhaps the intellectual energies of mankind can
never remain stationary; and a nation that ceases to produce original
and inventive minds, born to advance the landmarks of knowledge or
skill, will recede from step to step, till it loses even the secondary
merits of imitation and industry. During the third century, not only
there were no great writers, but even few names of indifferent writers
have been recovered by the diligence of modern inquiry.[480] Law
neglected, philosophy perverted till it became contemptible, history
nearly silent, the Latin tongue growing rapidly barbarous, poetry rarely
and feebly attempted, art more and more vitiated; such were the symptoms
by which the age previous to Constantine announced the decline of human
intellect. If we cannot fully account for this unhappy change, as I have
observed, we must, however, assign much weight to the degradation of
Rome and Italy in the system of Severus and his successors, to the
admission of barbarians into the military and even civil dignities of
the empire, to the discouraging influence of provincial and illiterate
sovereigns, and to the calamities which followed for half a century the
first invasion of the Goths and the defeat of Decius. To this sickly
condition of literature the fourth century supplied no permanent remedy.
If under the house of Constantine the Roman world suffered rather less
from civil warfare or barbarous invasions than in the preceding age, yet
every other cause of decline just enumerated prevailed with aggravated
force; and the fourth century set in storms, sufficiently destructive in
themselves, and ominous of those calamities which humbled the majesty of
Rome at the commencement of the ensuing period, and overwhelmed the
Western Empire in absolute and final ruin before its