in] PHASES OF PAGAN DECADENCE 37 occupied its proper secondary place as a study of how most fittingly to express the substance. After the death of Juvenal and Tacitus, the Latin power of literary creation waned rapidly, just as sub- stance and sincerity passed from oratory. Yet there was increased ardor for grammai- which taught cor- rectness of expression, and for rhetoric which sought to teach the higher virtues of style. So, both in prose and verse, the study of form went on while substance diminished. Latin education became more and more education in literary form. But form deteriorates when cultivated exclusively, since it can be good only in relation to the substance which it should express. And as the substance dwindles, the tendency develops to treat it in lofty language. Thus poetry and oratory became rhetorical and in the end bombastic. The latter-day pagan world illustrates the common rule, that literary taste, cultivated for its own sake in a period of waning creative power, becomes vapid ; and bad taste arising in this way is an evidence of general decline — of decadent humanity. An interesting illustration of this is the decline in the literary appreciation of the greatest work of Rome's greatest poet. As decade followed decade, and century followed century, there was no falling off in the study of the iEneid. Virgil's fame towered, his authority became absolute. But how ? In what respect? As a supreme master of grammatical cor- rectness and rhetorical exoellenoe and of all learning. With increasing emptiness of soul, the grammarians — the "Virgils" — of the succeeding centuries put the great poet to ever baser uses. Here the decadent
