DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE BY THE ROMANS. 391 



entertained feelings of humane compassion for the enslaved 

 condition of the people, a sentiment which was but seldom, 

 expressed in antiquity. On the estates of the younger Pliny 

 no fetters were used ; and the slave was permitted freely to 

 bequeath, as a cultivator of the soil, that which he had 

 acquired by the labour of his own hands.* 



No description has been transmitted to us from antiquity of 

 the eternal snow of the Alps, reddened by the evening glow 

 or the morning dawn, of the beauty of the blue ice of the gla- 

 ciers, or of the sublimity of Swiss natural scenery, although 

 statesmen and generals, with men of letters in their retinue, 

 continually passed through Helvetia on their road to Gaul. All 

 these travellers think only of complaining of the wretchedness 

 of the roads, and never appear to have paid any attention 

 to the romantic beauty of the scenery through which they 

 passed. It is even known that Julius Ca?sar, when he was 

 returning to his legions in Gaul, employed his time whilst he 

 was passing over the Alps in preparing a grammatical work, 

 entitled De Analogia.] Silius Italicus, who died in the time 

 of Trajan, when Switzerland was already considerably culti- 

 vated, describes the region of the Alps as a dreary and' barren 

 wilderness,^: at the same time that he extols with admiration 

 the rocky ravines of Italy, and the woody shores of the Liris 

 (Garigliano). It is also worthy of notice, that the remark- 

 able appearance of the jointed basaltic columns which are so 

 frequently met with, associated in groups, in central France, 

 on the banks of the Rhine, and in Lombardy, should never 

 have been described or even mentioned by Roman writers. 



At the period when the feelings died away, which had 

 animated classical antiquity, and directed the minds of men 

 to a visible manifestation of human activity, rather than to a 

 passive contemplation of the external world, a new spirit 

 arose ; Christianity gradually diffused itself, and wherever it 



* Plin., Epist., iii. 19; viii. 16. 



t Suet., in Julio Ccesare, cap. 56. The lost poem of Caesar (Iter) 

 described the journey to Spain when he led his army to his last military 

 action from Rome to Cordova, by land, (which was accomplished in 

 twenty-four days, according to Suetonius, and in twenty-seven days, 

 according to Strabo and Appian,) when the remnant of Pompey's party, 

 which had been defeated in Africa, had rallied together in Spain. 

 J Sil. Ital., Punica, lib. iii. v. 477. 



% Sil. Ital., Punica, lib. iy. v. 348; lib. viii. v. 399. 



