(6.) Virgil's pre-eminence as a literary artist and master of poetical expression is so generally acknowledged that it is not necessary to illustrate it in this preliminary statement of the position which he holds in Roman literature. The Augustan Age was characterised by a careful study and application of the principles of art, as well as by an elaborate culture. By the labours and reflection of three or four generations the Latin language had been gradually changed from a rude Italian dialect into a great organ of law, government, and literature. The efforts of the generation preceding the Augustan Age to attain to perfection in form and style received their fulfilment in the work accomplished by Virgil and Horace. Each of them, in his own way, obtained a complete success; but the sustained perfection of a long poem, epic or didactic, is a much greater result than the perfection shown in the composition of an ode. Virgil, alone among his countrymen, discerned the true conditions in accordance with which a long continuous poem, epic or didactic, could as a whole gain, and permanently retain, the ear of the world: and, in accordance with these conditions, he worked the various materials, descriptive, meditative, narrative, and commemorative, of the Georgics and Aeneid into poems of large compass, sustained interest, and finished execution. His style marks the maturity of development after which the vital force animating the growth of the Latin language begins to decay. One of the most sensible causes of this decay in the idiomatic structure of the language both of verse and prose is the predominance of Virgil's influence over the later writers. He and Horace introduced into Latin all that it could well bear of the subtlety and flexibility which characterise the Greek tongue. When first introduced, this infusion of a new force into the Latin language, modifying the use of words and altering the structure of sentences, probably appeared to the literary class at Rome a new source of wealth, colouring words and phrases with the gleam of old poetic association. But this new infusion, though an immediate source of wealth, tended to corrupt the pure current of native speech. The later poetical style of Rome never regains the lucidity and volume which it has in Lucretius, or the ease and sparkling flow of Catullus. The maturity of accomplishment immediately preceded and partly occasioned the decay in vital force.