simpliciter, ac libere.  Sed tanto magis laudandi probandique sunt, quos a scribendi recitandique studio haec auditorum vel desidia, vel superbia non retardat.  Equidem prope nemini defui:  his ex causis longius, quam destinaveram, tempus in urbe consumpsi.  Possum jam repetere secessum, et scribere aliquid, quod non recitem, ne videar, quorum recitationibus affui, non auditor fuisse, sed creditor.  Nam, ut in caeteris rebus, ita in audiendi officio, perit gratia si reposcatur. Pliny, lib. i. ep. 13.  Such was the state of literature under the worst of the emperors.  The Augustan age was over.  In the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula learning drooped, but in some degree revived under the dull and stupid Claudius.  Pliny, in the letter above cited, says of that emperor, that, one day hearing a noise in his palace, he enquired what was the cause, and, being informed that Nonianus was reciting in public, went immediately to the place, and became one of the audience.  After that time letters met with no encouragement from the great.  Lord Shaftesbury says, he cannot but wonder how the Romans, after the extinction of the Caesarean and Claudian family, and a short interval of princes raised and destroyed with much disorder and public ruin, were able to regain their perishing dominion, and retrieve their sinking state, by an after-race of wise and able princes, successively adopted, and taken from a private state to rule the empire of the world.  They were men, who not only possessed the military virtues, and supported that sort of discipline in the highest degree; but as they sought the interest of the world, they did what was in their power to restore liberty, and raise again the perishing arts, and the decayed virtue of mankind.  But the season was past:  barbarity and gothicism were already entered into the arts, ere the savages made an impression on the empire.  See Advice to an Author, part. ii. s. 1.  The gothicism, hinted at by Shaftesbury, appears manifestly in the wretched situation to which the best authors were reduced.  The poets who could not hope to procure an audience, haunted the baths and public walks, in order to fasten on their friends, and, at any rate, obtain a hearing for their works.  Juvenal says, the plantations and marble columns of Julius Fronto resounded with the vociferation of reciting poets: 

Frontonis platani convulsaque marmora clamant
Semper, et assiduo ruptae lectore columnae. 
Expectes eadem a summo minimoque poeta. 

          
                                                SAT. i. ver. 12.

The same author observes, that the poet, who aspired to literary fame, might borrow an house for the purpose of a public reading; and the great man who accommodated the writer, might arrange his friends and freedmen on the back seats, with direction not to be sparing of their applause; but still a stage or pulpit, with convenient benches, was to be procured, and that expence the patrons of letters would not supply.