Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/147

 The height and purity of the Roman style, as it began towards the time of Lucretius, which was about that of the Jugurthin war, so it ended about that of Tiberius, and the last strain of it seems to have been Velleius Paterculus. The purity of the Greek lasted a great deal longer and must be allowed till Trajan's time, when Plutarch wrote, whose Greek is much more estimable than the Latin of Tacitus his contemporary. After this last I know none that deserves the name of Latin in comparison of what went before them, especially in the Augustan age: if any it is the little treatise of Minutius Felix. All Latin books that we have till the end of Trajan, and all Greek till the end of Marcus Antoninus, have a true and very estimable value. All written since that time seem to me to have little more than what comes from the relation of events we are glad to know, or the controversy of opinions in religion or laws, wherein the busy world has been so much employed.

The great wits among the moderns have been, in my opinion, and in their several kinds, of the Italian: Boccace, Machiavel, and Padre Paolo; among the Spaniards: Cervantes, who writ Don Quixote, and