BY THE ROMANS. 



in the " jEtna Dialogus" ( 34 ) of the youthful Bembo, men- 

 tioned with praise in the preceding volume. 



"When, after the close of the fourth century, poetry 

 in its grander and nobler forms faded away, as if ex- 

 hausted, poetic attempts, deprived of the magic of creative 

 imagination, were occupied only with the drier realities of 

 knowledge and description : and a certain rhetorical polish 

 of style could ill replace the simple feeling for nature, 

 and the idealising inspiration, of an earlier age. We may 

 name as a production of this barren period, in which the 

 poetic element appears only as an accidental and merely 

 external ornament, a poem on the Mo elle, by Ausonius, a 

 native of Aquitanian Gaul, who had aca mpanied Yalentinian 

 in his campaign against the Allemann:'. The "Mosella," 

 which was composed at ancient Treves ( ?s ), describes some- 

 times not unpleasingly the already vine-covered hills of 

 one of the loveliest rivers of Germany ; but the mere topo- 

 graphy of the country, the enumeration of the streams which 

 flow into the Moselle, and the characters^, in form, colour, 

 and habits, of some of the different kinds of fish which are 

 found in the river, are the principal objects of this purely 

 didactic composition. 



In the works of Roman prose writers, among which we 

 have already referred to some remarkable passages by Cicero, 

 descriptions of natural scenery are as rare as in those of 

 Greek writers of the same class ; but the great historians 

 Julius Caesar, Livy, and Tacitus in relating the conflicts 

 of men wiiji natural obstacles and with hostile forces, are 

 sometimes led to give descriptions of fields of battle, and 

 of the passage of rivers, or of difficult mountain passes. In 

 the Annals of Tacitus, I am delighted with the description 



