The golden age of letters in Rome was as short as it was brilliant. It scarcely surpassed in duration the ordinary term of human life. Commencing with Cicero, it closed with the generation who were his cotemporaries, the last who breathed the free air of the republic. But in the universal corruption of taste and morals that followed the extinction of liberty, there arose one man, Tacitus, whose genius belonged to a happier age. In his own, it has been remarked with as much truth as beauty, he stands like a column in the midst of ruins. It has been said that the secret of his style belongs to the circumstances of his life, as well as to the peculiar temperament of the man. He wrote the history of his own times, and they presented but few bright spots on which the eye could repose with pleasure. But he paints the features of that dark and fearful peace, of that awful and portentous silence of despotism, convulsed as it was by internal dissensions and agitated by all the vices of a profligate populace and an abandoned nobility, in words of enchantment. While they seem to express every thing that is terrible in tragedy, they suggest to the imagination more than meets the ear. No man could have described those scenes as he has done but one who had seen and felt them. His vivid and graphic pictures speak at once to the eye, to the imagination, and to the heart; and without any of the parade or ostentation of eloquence, he impresses on the mind of the reader all the feelings which seem to prevail in his own.
The current of fashion has for some time been setting strongly against classical learning. In an age of so much intellectual activity as the present, all sorts of new opinions are received with favor. The most extravagant have their hour of triumph until they are chased from the stage by some new absurdity, or until the restless love of change is drawn off to some more startling paradox. This insatiable thirst for novelty is carried into literature as well as other things. But the principles of good taste are unchangeable. They have their foundations deeply laid in nature and truth, and the tide of time which sweeps into oblivion the sickly illusions of distempered imaginations, passes over these unhurt. The Bavii and Maevii of former ages, who like those of later times enjoyed for their hour the sunshine of fashionable celebrity, have been long ago gathered to their long home, but the beauties of Homer and Virgil are as fresh now as they were at the beginning. Independent of the arguments commonly used in favor of classical learning, there are two considerations which recommend these studies to peculiar favor in this country. I advert to them the more willingly, because they have not been usually urged in proportion to their importance.