motives of its opposition to an oratory of pure display; and we
have seen that Balzac spoke of "the style of Brutus" as if it were
a familiar form that could be studied at large in existing documents.
The example of Cæsar again served their purposes in the same way.
That he did not actually belong to a particular school of philosophy
or style made no lifference. For his conduct, and that of his
legionaries, were regarded as the counterparts in practise of the
heroic virtue which Epictetus and Seneca portray in its moral and
inward effects; 52 and his style, virile and soldatesque, like his life,
would have been taken by Montaigne and Bacon as the model of
their own, in preference to that of Seneca or Tacitus, if they had
not been compelled by the spirit of their age to be rhetoricians
malgré soi."

But seventeenth-century writers could not imitate Brutus or
Cæsar or Cato in their own style. The explicit and inartificial
candor of the Republic was the quality that some of them loved
best, but none of them could emulate it in their own manners,
because they were living in a different kind of an age and were
wholly conscious of the difference. They felt sincerely, almost
instinctively indeed, that they were living in a period of decline.
There had been a culmination of energy and confidence in the
sixteenth century; but the external unities of the Renaissance were
dissolving, and the most striking phenomenon of the new age
was the division between their outward and inward interests and
allegiances which revealed itself to its wisest minds. As in the
first century, authorities and orthodoxies were establishing them-
selves in the corporate political and spiritual life of the age which
derived their sanction from its weaknesses rather than from its
strength; and these the 'good man,' the 'sage,' felt himself bound

In a sea-letter to his father the sailor-son of Sir Th. Browne is naïvely delighted with the spirit of the old Cæsarian legions as portrayed in Lucan's Pharsalia. "It would have served [us] well," he says, "and had probably concluded the war in our fight with the Dutch." Works of Bir Th. B., ed. Wilkins, London, 1842, 1, p. 142-3.

"Daniello Bartoli (I Precepti, chap. 7), describing the "modern" style (a name often given to the new "Attic"), says: "Its beauty does not rob it of its strength. It can make the same boast that Cæsar's soldiers did, who were able etiam unguentati bene pugnare. Bacon's Secretary names Cæsar with Seneca and Tacitus as his favorite authors. Montaigne's almost poetic praises of him are well known.

to support or obey because they were the only safeguards against the evils which the divisions and corrupt tendencies of the time would bring in their train if they were left free to work out their natural results. But his true devotion was given elsewhere; his true ideals were not embodied in the external forms and symbols of the age; his real standards could not be made manifest by signs which would be visible to the crowd. In such an age the true literary modes are those that serve the purposes of criticism, protest, individual intelligence. The ideal form of style to which it refers is of course the "natural" style which expresses naïvely the candor of the soul. But in fact the style it demands for its self-expression is one that has been wrought upon with subtle art to reveal the secret experiences of arduous and solitary minds, to express, even in the intricacies and subtleties of its form, the difficulties of a soul exploring unfamiliar truth by the unaided exercise of its own faculties.

It was not only its social and political state, however, that turned its literary tastes in the direction of the inferior Atticism of the Empire. An explanation that lies nearer the surface of things is found in the state of its artistic culture, the character of its literary tastes as determined by its historical position. It was still in the Renaissance, or at least was its immediate successor, and it had not yet cast away the love of rhetorical ornament for its own sake which had descended to the Renaissance from the middle ages. Its purpose indeed was to escape from this tradition, to represent things as they are, to be as little ornate and rhetorical as possible; but it could not express even this purpose except by means of artifice, mannerism, device. It was still somewhat "Gothic" in spite of itself; and the rhetoric elaborated in the schools of declamation offered it exactly the opportunity it needed to indulge what was most traditional, most unclassical in its tastes under the protection of classical authority.

For these, and doubtless for many other, reasons there was revival of silver-age literature in the seventeenth century, or in

"This view is more rigorously asserted in Fulke Greville's neglected prose-classic A Letter to an Honourable Lady than almost anywhere else. But it is implied in the voluntary retirement of Montaigne and Charron, Lipsius and Balzac, Greville and Browne, to mention only a few of the philosophical solitaries of this age.

the period from 1575 to 1675 which we are treating here as the seventeenth century. Many of the isolated facts which are included in this general statement and justify it have been noted of course by literary history. But the disingenuous or merely traditional orthodoxy which runs through the age has partly veiled the actualities of its taste and practise from the eyes of modern students. And it is partly at least for this reason that the period (1575-1675) between the Renaissance, properly so-called, and the neo-Classical age has never been clearly differentiated in literary history, although in the other arts, in sculpture, painting, and architecture, its character has been recognized and described. We shall not understand the seventeenth century, we shall not know the exact meaning of the eighteenth century, until we have come to realize more clearly than we now do that a century intervened between the eighteenth and the sixteenth in which Lucan had a more effective influence on the ideas and the style of poetry than Virgil did; in which Seneca was more loved and much! more effectively imitated in prose-style than Cicero had been in the previous generations; in which Tacitus almost completely displaced Livy as the model of historical and political writing; in which Martial was preferred to Catullus, and Juvenal and Persius were more useful to the satirists than Horace; in which Tertullian, the Christian representative of the Stoic style of the Empire notre Sénèque, as he was called-exercised a stronger power of attraction over the most representative minds than St. Augustine, who is the Cicero and the Ciceronian of patristic Latin. These are the great names. But the movement of imitation and rehabilitation extended the broad mantle of its charity over minor works which have not at any other time been well regarded by the modern world. Velleius Paterculus' odd mixture of anecdote and aphorism" and Pliny's unpleasing Panegyric to Trajan"

"In Boccalini's Ragguagli di Parnaso, 1, 23, Velleius Paterculus carries Lipsius' works to Apollo to receive immortality, and leads the author himself into the presence, between "Seneca the moralist" and "Tacitus the politician." There is an allusion here to Lipsius' Commentary on Paterculus. Gracian the concettisto finds in Paterculus a store-house of examples of his loved Agudeza.

"Dom Jean Goulu, the translator of Epictetus, published a long eulogy and analysis of the Panegyric to Trajan (Lettres de Phyllarque è Ariste, 1628, Seconde Partie). Lipsius made a commentary on the work, and

played their several parts, and not unimportant ones, in seventeenth-century prose history; and it would be possible to add interesting details concerning the taste of this period for other minor authors of the first century. But space must be reserved even in so general a survey for the mention of two Greek writers, by no means minor, who were at Rome during the period of Seneca and Tacitus and display in different ways the spirit of the Roman culture of their time. Plutarch's Morals and Epictetus' Discourses, known chiefly in translation, exercised an enormous influence upon the moral ideas, and only a little less upon the literary ideas, of the generation from Montaigne to Pascal.

The zeal of this revival was not more remarkable than its success. It is probably true that no other modern period has so thoroughly domesticated in its own literary productions the thought and the style of a period of antiquity; and the title of the Silver Age of modern literature as applied to the period of European literature beginning about 1575 would have considerably more, in its favor than nicknames given by this method of nomenclature usually have.

To prove the soundness of assertions sweeping over so wide an area as this would of course be impossible within the limits of a single paper; and even the evidence concerning prose-style, which is all that we are concerned with here, would only be convincing through its cumulative effect in a series of chapters. There is no more than room here to gather together a few of the passages in which the dependence of the age upon first-century models is most broadly depicted.

François Vavasseur, the French Jesuit rhetorician of chief authority in the middle of the century, may almost be said to have devoted his literary career to the exposition of the silver-age proclivities of his time and an attack upon them. His admirable treatise on the Epigram is meant to show, among other things, the superior excellence of Catullus over Martial, and that on the Novum Dicendi Genus is an accurate and sweeping description of the preference of the age for the Latin authors of the Decadence." All this is echoed, but less clearly and with less candor, in the

analyses of it were common in Italy and Spain, as were imitations. For an English imitation see Wotton's Panegyrick to King Charles.

"Vavasseur (Vavassor), F., Oratio Tertia, Contra Novum Dicendi Genus, Opera Omnia, 1709, pp. 201-209.

later opinions of Balzac, who probably learned more from Vavasseur than his critics have confessed. But Balzac is torn between his romantic tastes and his classical judgment; and the perspective is better preserved in two critics of the latter half of the century. In describing the taste of Priolo, the historian, for the ancient AntiCiceronians of the first century, Bayle allows himself to enlarge his theme into a discussion of the contrast between the three Augustans, Cicero, Livy and Virgil, who have an eloquence of the same general kind, he says, and Seneca, Pliny, Tacitus, and Lucan, whose style he describes in striking terms of denunciation, and adds: "The French begin to be sick of the same distemper." One questions, after reading what he says of Mdlle. de Gournai and Montaigne, and other writers of the earlier part of the century, whether he does not mean the word begin ironically." Father Bouhours, at least, has no doubt of the cause of the distempers which have appeared for a century in French style. In his various critical writings he constantly draws a parallel between a certain class of ancient authors, in which Seneca, Tacitus, Lucan, and Tertullian are the chief names, and the authors of the century past. At different places he includes on the modern side of the parallel Montaigne, Lipsius, Balzac, the concettisti of Spain and Italy, especially Gracian and Malvezzi, and a great array of other writers of the seventeenth century. And in his best-known work he represents Philanthe, the voice of the common tastes of his time, as saying that he finds his opinions beginning to change: he does not despair of some day coming to prefer Virgil to Lucan, Cicero to Seneca."

Poets and prose-writers are mingled in these citations indiscriminately; and in this respect they correctly represent the criticism of the time, which usually makes no distinction between them in discussions of style. There is no lack of witnesses, however, who are concerned wholly with questions of prose; rather there is an embarrassment of riches. We need not cite the polemics of Muret and Lipsius, who were engaged in a deliberate attempt to

"The references are all to the Dictionnaire. See also the articles on Balzac, Goulu, and Javersac.

"La Manière de bien Penser dans les Ouvrages d'Esprit, ed. 1715, p. 445, Third Dialogue, at the end especially. Compare also p. 514: "Plus capable de préférer les pointes de Sénèque au bon sens de Cicéron, et le clinquant de Tasse à l'or de Virgile."