A RAMBLE IN PLINY'S LETTERS

SCHOLARS, I believe, rate the letters of the younger Pliny as hardly worthy of mention beside those of Cicero. Dr. Middleton, in his once famous Life of Cicero, compared the two, and, while conceding to those of Pliny an attractive style, pronounced their contents to show "a poverty and barrenness through the whole." Pliny lived in other times and under other conditions than those which give historical and tragic significance to the letters of Cicero; and Pliny himself, as we shall see, was well aware of this difference, but there is nothing very fruitful in the kind of criticism which asks of a comedy why it was not a tragedy. But then there is the line which scholars draw between the golden and the silver age, and Pliny falls within the later period. And certainly the language of Cicero's letters shows a nervous vigour and a spontaneity for which one looks in vain in those of Pliny. But there is a compensation to the unlearned in the fact that Pliny is the easier author. Perhaps this is one reason why the

Letters of Pliny long ago became almost an English classic, whereas the wholly successful translation of Cicero's is still to seek. In the great age of English letter-writing Pliny had a remarkable vogue. The translation by William Melmoth, himself the author of letters much admired in his day, was first published in 1747, and was in a tenth edition before the eighteenth century was out. With some alterations it was revived in the Bohn's Library of the last generation; and, again corrected and somewhat curtailed, it will continue to live in the excellent Loeb Library of to-day. Lord Orrery, the friend of Swift, had a version in preparation when Melmoth's appeared, but, undeterred, he published his book in 1751, and it also ran through several editions. Warton said that Melmoth's translation was a better work than the original. Perhaps this judgement was meant to cover some reflection upon Pliny's latinity. But it is always possible to get one scholar to contradict another, and on turning to the Encyclopædia Britannica I find these remarks by Professor Paley: "As a writer the younger Pliny is as graceful, fluent, and polished as the style of the elder Pliny is crabbed and obscure. Indeed, the latinity of the epistles cannot be fairly called inferior to that of Cicero himself. There are few indications of the deterioration (if progress and development in a language ought to be so called) of the Silver Age." So one

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may dip into Pliny's letters and appreciate his felicities of expression without compunction. And as for the comparison on other grounds with Cicero, one may let it rest with the sound sentence of Lord Orrery: "Pliny must not die because Cicero must live: Vivat uterque."

One reason why Pliny appealed so strongly to the polite circles of the eighteenth century is that he was a patron of literature. He had to the full the passionate longing of the Romans to leave a name and a memorial behind them, and he knew that, in the political conditions of the Empire, literature was his only doorway to such life after death. He is for ever keeping himself up to the mark in pursuit of that high endeavour and urging his friends to cultivate the same ambition. Nothing so strongly affects me," he writes to Titinius Capito (v. 8), " as the desire of a lasting name: a passion highly worthy of the human breast." Shape and fashion something," he writes to Caninius Rufus (i. 3), "that shall be really and for ever your own. All your other possessions will pass on from one master to another this alone, when once it is yours, will for ever be so." And again to another correspondent (ii. 10): "Remember, my friend, the mortality of human nature, and that there is nothing so likely to preserve your name as monument of this kind; all others are as frail

and perishable as the men themselves and fall and pass like them." He was not a literary recluse. He was zealous in discharge of such political and municipal duties as were within his reach; he was a model landlord; he built churches and founded schools. But he knew that all these things would pass away, and that through literature alone could he hope to win some share of the immortality which he predicted-assuredly for his revered master, Tully, and with a shade less of confidence for his own friend and contemporary, Tacitus.

Pliny has in some measure realised his ambition, but not in the way that he chiefly hoped, and it is this that lends an element of tragi-comedy to his

letters. speeches it was to the composition of these, and to the polishing and re-polishing of them, that he devoted his most laborious care. A friend asked him why he did not write some historical work. He confessed that he felt attraction to such an attempt (v. 8). "Oratory and Poetry," he wrote, "meet small favour unless carried to the highest point of eloquence, but History pleases however written; for mankind are naturally inquisitive, and information, however baldly presented, has its charms for beings who like even small talk and anecdote." He admitted the forces of some other inducements also, but he felt that the more difficult was the more compelling path

What he was proudest of was his

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to fame. He was but nineteen when he first appeared at the Bar, and it was only now at last that he began to perceive (and that but dimly) what is essential to the perfect orator. Pliny thought that he had pleaded some very important causes, and his first and principal care must be to seek immortality by revising these speeches; for, as far as posterity is concerned, "a work that has not received the last polish counts no more than if you had never begun it." Alas! for the vanity of human wishes. Of the speeches upon which Pliny bestowed the last polish only one has survived, and that one-the Panegyric on Trajan does not serve to place Pliny, as he seems sometimes to have hoped, in the company of Demosthenes and Cicero. Only a rare combination of abiding historical or philosophical interest with the antiseptic of style suffices to preserve political specimens of eloquence. English there are, it has been said, only two sets of speeches which can still be read-Mr. Burke's and Lord Macaulay's. "It is our business to speak," said the most famous orator of our own day, "but the words which we speak have wings and fly away and disappear." Even before Mr. Gladstone himself had died, the truth of his remark was illustrated. An edition of his speeches in some ten volumes was projected, and two test volumes, the ninth and tenth, were put out. The latest speeches were thus issued first,

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