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Lucian and the other writers of the Augustan era, have handed down to us sufficient information to show how Pantomime in Rome was so highly thought of.
But it is only the absorbing interest of the matter which makes this kind of writing long endurable. It is, in truth, the beginning of barbarism; and Suetonius measures more than half the distance from the fine familiar prose of the Golden Age to the base jargon of the authors of the Augustan History a century and a half later, under Diocletian.
His Latin poetry is not without a certain barbaric splendour; but it discovers, as might be expected, no skill in the more refined graces of the Augustan age. The verse he quoted to Thomas Warton as his favourite, from the translation of Pope's Messiah, Vallis aromaticas fundit Saronica nubes,
That the earlier Augustan poets should leave their great predecessor completely unnoticed is less remarkable, for it may be taken as merely a part of that curious conspiracy of silence regarding the writers of the Ciceronian age which, whether under political pressure or not, they all adopted.
The Augustan age produced nothing equal to their finer passages. In France that licensed jester, whose jingling cap and motley coat concealed more genius than ever mustered in the saloon of Ninon or of Madame Geoffrin, was succeeded by writers as decorous and as tiresome as gentlemen ushers. The poetry of Italy and of Spain has undergone the same change.
The Sortes Vergilianae, if we may believe the confused gossip of the Augustan History, were almost a State institution, while rationalism was still the State creed in ordinary matters.
Independently of Synods, the Augustan Confession of Faith is the point of union of all Lutherans, and by which they are distinguished from other denominations. As all bear the same name, and are pledged to maintain the same creed, they are viewed as one body.
I ought to have told you that Richard, when a boy, was a great reader of English poetry; but his exercises afforded no proof of his proficiency. In truth, he, as a boy, was quite careless about literary fame. I should suppose that his father, without any regular system, polished his taste, and supplied his memory with anecdotes about our best writers in our Augustan age.
"Heroics are old-fashioned; but the Chaucer couplet, as brought to perfection by our modern poets, I think the best adapted to dainty leaves and uncrackable nuts. I accept the modern Chaucerian. The subject?" "Oh, never trouble yourself about that. By whatever title your Augustan verse-maker labels his poem, his genius, like Pindar's, disdains to be cramped by the subject.
Saeculum==indoles et mores saeculi, the spirit of the age, the fashion. From these, it passed naturally, in Quintilian and the writers after him, into the sense of even more, still more, even, especially in connection with the comparative degree; where the authors of the Augustan age would have used etiam. See Z. 486; Boetticher's Lex. Tac. sub. voce; and Hand's Tursellinus, vol. 1.
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