The Roman may have had little inclination towards abstract thinking, but he was not an idle-minded man.  Even the emperors often cultivated the muse.  Nero we have seen, wrote verses, while his predecessor Claudius bore a strangely near resemblance to our own James I., not only in respect of his weakness of character, but also of his pretensions to erudition and authorship.  We can hardly read the literature of this and the next half-century without being amazed at the number of names of writers who gained or sought some share of repute, although few of them have left works important enough to have been kept alive till now.  It is true that through all the writing of this time there runs what has been called the “falsetto” note, a fact which is due partly to the absence of live national questions or the freedom to discuss them, and partly to the false principles of the rhetorical training already described.  The general desire was to show cleverness, wide reading, and information; there was no impulse to great creation or to exhibitions of profound feeling.  Epigram and “point” are no less compassed in the overstrained epic of Lucan, and in the philosophic essays of Seneca, than in the satires of Persius.  It is probable that what have been called intellectual “interests” were never more widely spread than in the pax Romana of the first and second centuries A.D.  We gather from literature that books innumerable were produced on subjects often as special and minute as those selected for a German thesis, and that almost every town worth the name, at least in the Greek-speaking part of the empire, produced an author of sorts.  But when we look into the symposia or chat of Plutarch or Aulus Gellius, we cannot fail to note that a large proportion of this intellectual and literary activity was being frittered away on questions either stereotyped and threadbare, or of no appreciable utility either to knowledge or conduct.  As for dilettante production at Rome itself Pliny remarks in one letter:  “This year has produced a large crop of poets:  there was scarcely a day in the whole month of April on which some one did not give a reading.”  During the generation into which Nero was born and that which followed him, we meet with no great creative work in either prose or poetry, no great contribution to the progress of science or thought.  The most generally interesting writer of the whole period was the Greek Plutarch, but though the Parallel Lives which he was preparing are immortal in their kind, and though his Moral Essays are often most excellent reading, it cannot be said that he is a profound original thinker or a creator of anything more than a taking literary form.  Next to him in value, earlier in date, stands Seneca, who, like Plutarch, is a lively thinker and a deft essayist, with the same love for a quotation and the same wide interests, but assuredly not a considerable enlarger of the field of human thought.  To those who know