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Rh with eloquence. A better day, however, was at hand. Tacitus marks as the period of the greatest sensual excesses in Rome that which separates the battle of Actium from the accession of Nerva; and he speaks of Vespasian's reign as the beginning of an epoch of improvement in morals and of amended taste in literature. The 'Dialogue on the Orators,' composed, if not made public, in the fifth year of that emperor's reign, displays the leading features of the controversy between the reformers and the corrupters of the Latin language. The advocates of a simpler and less artificial manner did not gain a complete victory, nor their opponents suffer an entire defeat. Even Quintilian, who, as he himself tells us, was the first to uplift his voice against a depraved fashion in writing and speaking, does not recommend a complete return to the theory or practice of the Ciceronian time. And he judged wisely and well. No sensible critic of the present moment would advise a recurrence to the language of Bacon or Addison. In his own writings Quintilian obeyed the laws which he prescribed to his pupils and readers. But although he set the example of a better form, he could not rekindle the spirit and passionate heat of the Catilinarian and Philippic orations. Some of the vices of the Neronian period were abandoned; yet even Tacitus himself is not quite free from the blemish of epigrammatic sentences, while in the verse of the time the reaction was even less complete.

Besides its proper subject, the decline and the possible revival of Roman oratory, the 'Dialogue' contains much information on literature generally. This will appear from a short sketch of its plot and dramatis personæ. Like many of Cicero's treatises on oratory