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168 tion of a natural style. They applauded the graceful and often the dignified character of his sentences, the richness of his diction, his art in opening a speech, his felicity in shaping it, and the force or splendour of his perorations. Yet these virtues, it was maintained by the latter, would be accounted tedious by a generation of jurors and hearers less patient than their forefathers were of long sentences and artistically-constructed periods. The champions of the new fashion had some ground for their opinion. Not only are the races of men like leaves on trees, but their tastes also. The pulpit eloquence of Isaac Barrow might perplex rather than edify a modern congregation; the speeches of Chesterfield or Burke would more astonish than persuade a House of Commons at the present day. Sensational speeches were, in the earlier years of Tacitus, as much in vogue as sensational plays and novels are now in Britain. The fashion in style set in great measure by Seneca, and against which Quintilian, while admitting that author's great gifts, so warmly protested, affected the language of the bar as well as that of philosophy or literature. In Nero's time, when this half-prosaic, half-poetic diction reached its height, nothing would go down with those who frequented law courts or lecture rooms except short, sharp, epigrammatically-turned sentences. Commonplace thoughts, in order to make them appear new, rare, or ingenious, were twisted into innumerable forms, for the construction of which professors of rhetoric drew up rules and supplied examples. The Controversial and Suasorian essays of the oldest of the Senecas, who might have listened to Cicero himself, are a sort of recipe-books for a culinary process of dealing