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In neglecting Tibullus and Propertius, Quintilian and the Plinies, Statius, Martial, even Terence and Plautus whose jargon full of neologisms, compound words and diminutives, could please him, but whose low comedy and gross humor he loathed, Des Esseintes only began to be interested in the Latin language with Lucan. Here it was liberated, already more expressive and less dull.
Able scholars of most recent times have looked into Luther's writings with a view of determining how much learned knowledge he had actually acquired, even before he began his reformatory work, They have found that Luther was "very well versed in the favorite Latin authors of the day: Vergil, Terence, Ovid, Aesop, Cicero, Livy, Seneca, Horace, Catullus, Juvenal, Silius, Statius, Lucan, Suetonius, Sallust, Quintilian, Varro, Pomponius Mela, the two Plinies, and the Germania of Tacitus."
It was night ere the two Plinies appeared towing Mike, as their great namesakes of antiquity might have brought in a Carthaginian galley, in triumph. The county Leitrim-man had made his way with excessive toil about a league ere he was met, and glad enough was he to see his succour approach.
Here she found, already established, the two Plinies, with Mari', the sister of the elder Pliny, Bess, the wife of the younger, and Mony alias Desdemona a collateral of the race, by ties and affinities that garter-king-at- arms could not have traced genealogically; since he would have been puzzled to say whether the woman was the cousin, or aunt, or step- daughter of Mari', or all three.
And will the Como boys become sparkling little Plinies? "I must see the grown-up Pliny's noble brow and my Calpurnia's eyes and the Tartarean frown of Tacitus, who, I hear, is with you. Quadratus says you are at the smallest of your Como villas. The mood suits me. At Tusculum or Tibur or Praeneste or Laurentum you might have longed for me in vain.
The Plinies were undoubtedly two of the ablest and most enlightened men of their time; and the belief in the value of dreams is certainly not extinct among us yet. Plutarch placed great faith in ghosts and visions. In his Life of Dion he notes the singular fact that both Dion and Brutus were warned of their approaching deaths by a frightful spectre.
The doorways of the façade are decorated with the same rare workmanship; and the canopies, supported by naked fauns and slender twisted figures, under which the two Plinies are seated, may be reckoned among the supreme achievements of delicate Renaissance sculpture. The Plinies are not like the work of the same master. They are older, stiffer, and more Gothic.
Although the captain was somewhat of a martinet in his domestic discipline, it had ever altogether exceeded his authority, or his art, to prevent these bursts of merriment; and he led his wife away from the din, leaving Mari', Great Smash, and Little Smash, with the two Plinies, in ecstasies at their own uproar. Burst succeeded burst, until the Indian walked away, in offended dignity.
From the death of Augustus, Roman literature had gradually declined, and though it shone forth for a time with classic radiance in the writings of Persius, Juvenal, Quintilian, Tacitus, and the Plinies, with the death of freedom, the extinction of patriotism, and the decay of the national spirit, nothing could avert its fall.
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