One faculty of the greatest importance to literary eminence was possessed by the Romans in the highest perfection, because it may be acquired as well as innate, and is always improved and polished by education: that faculty is taste—the ability, as Addison defines it, to discern the beauties of an author with pleasure, and his imperfections with dislike.
Of the three periods into which this history is divided, the first may be considered as _dramatic_. Eloquence, indeed, made rapid strides, and C. Gracchus may be considered as the father of Latin prose; but the language was not sufficiently smoothed and polished; the sentiments of the orator were far superior to the diction in which they were conveyed. Jurisprudence also was studied with thoughtfulness and accuracy; history, however, was nothing more than annals, and epic poetry rugged and monotonous. But the acting tragedy of the Romans is almost exclusively confined to this period; and the comedies of Plautus and Terence were then written, which have survived to command the admiration of modern times. Although, at this epoch, the language was elaborately polished and embellished with the utmost variety of graceful forms and expressions, it was simple and unconstrained: it flowed easily and naturally, and was therefore full and copious; brevity and epigrammatic terseness are acquired qualities, and the result of art, although that art may be skilfully concealed.
The second period consists of two subdivisions, of which the first was the era of _prose_, and, consequently, the period at which the language attained its greatest perfection; for the structure, power, and genius of a language must be judged of by its prose, and not by its poetry. Cicero is the representative of this era as an orator and philosopher—Cæsar and Sallust as historians. The second subdivision, or the Augustan age, is the era of poetry, for in it poetry arrived at the same eminence which prose had attained in the preceding generation. But the age of Cicero and that of Augustus can only be made subdivisions of one great period; they are not separated from each other by a strong line of demarkation; they are blended together, and gradually melt into one another. In the former, Lucretius and Catullus were the harbingers of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid; and, in the latter, the sun of Cicero, Cæsar, and Sallust, seems to set in the sweet narrative of Livy.