1869, aged eighty, and lies buried in San Bernardo, the church | suspicion was roused, and when it was, the king showed a hateful wherein he worshipped. There are biographies by J. Beavington Atkinson (1882) and Howitt (1886). (J. B. A.) OVERBURY, SIR THOMAS (1581-1613), English poet and essayist, and the victim of one of the most sensational crimes in English history, was the son of Nicholas Overbury, of Bourtonon-the-Hill, and was born in 1581 at Compton Scorpion, near Ilmington, in Warwickshire. In the autumn of 1595 he became a gentleman commoner of Queen's College, Oxford, took his degree of B.A. in 1598 and came to London to study law in the Middle Temple. He found favour with Sir Robert Cecil, travelled on the Continent and began to enjoy a reputation for an accomplished mind and free manners. About the year 1601, being in Edinburgh on a holiday, he met Robert Carr, then an obscure page to the earl of Dunbar; and so great a friendship was struck up between the two youths that they came up to London together. The early history of Carr remains obscure, and it is probable that Overbury secured an introduction to Court before his young associate contrived to do so. At all events, when Carr attracted the attention of James I., in 1606, by breaking his leg in the tilt-yard, Overbury had for some time been servitor-in-ordinary to the king. He was knighted in June 1608, and in 1609 he travelled in France and the Low Countries. He seems to have followed the fortunes of Carr very closely, and "such was the warmth of the friendship, that they were inseparable, ... nor could Overbury enjoy any felicity but in the company of him he loved [Carr]." When the latter was made Lord Rochester in 1610, the intimacy seems to have been sustained. But it was now destroyed by a new element. Early in 1611 the Court became aware of the mutual attraction between Rochester and the infamous and youthful countess of Essex, who seemed to have bewitched the handsome Scots adventurer. To this intrigue Overbury was from the first violently opposed, pointing out to Rochester that an indulgence in it would be hurtful to his preferment, and that the woman, even at this early stage in her career, was already "noted for her injury and immodesty." He went so far as to use, in describing her, a word which was not more just than scandalous. But Rochester was now infatuated, and he repeated to the countess what Overbury had said. It was at this time, too, that Overbury wrote, and circulated widely in MS., the poem called "His Wife," which was a picture of the virtues which a young man should demand in a woman before he has the rashness to marry her. It was represented to Lady Essex that Overbury's object in writing this poem was to open the eyes of Rochester to her defects. The situation now resolved itself into a deadly duel for the person of Rochester between the mistress and the friend. The countess contrived to lead Overbury into such a trap as to make him seem disrespectful to the king, and she succeeded so completely that he was thrown into the Tower on the 22nd of April 1613. It was not known at the time, and it is not certain now, how far Rochester participated in this first crime, or whether he was ignorant of it. But the queen, by a foolish phrase, had sown discord between the friends; she had called Overbury Rochester's "governor." It is, indeed, apparent that Overbury had become arrogant with success, and was no longer a favourite at Court. Lady Essex, however, was not satisfied with having had him shut up; she was determined that "he should return no more to this stage." She had Sir William Wade, the honest Governor of the Tower, removed to make way for a creature of her own, Sir Gervaise Elvis (or Helwys); and a gaoler, of whom it was ominously said that he was a man well acquainted with the power of drugs," was set to attend on Overbury. This fellow, afterwards aided by Mrs Turner, the widow of a physician, and by an apothecary called Franklin, plied the miserable poet with sulphuric acid in the form of copper vitriol. But his constitution long withstood the timid doses they gave him, and he lingered in exquisite sufferings until the 15th of September 1613, when more violent measures put an end to his existence. Two months later Rochester, now earl of Somerset, married the chief murderess, Lady Essex. More than a year passed before 46 disinclination to bring the offenders to justice. In the celebrated trial which followed, however, the wicked plot was all discovered. The four accomplices were hanged; the countess of Somerset pleaded guilty but was spared, and Somerset himself was disgraced. Meanwhile, Overbury's poem, The Wife, was published in 1614, and ran through six editions within a year, the scandal connected with the murder of the author greatly aiding its success. It was abundantly reprinted within the next sixty years, and it continued to be one of the most widely popular books of the 17th century. Combined with later editions of The Wife, and gradually adding to its bulk, were "Characters" (first printed in the second of the 1614 editions), "The Remedy of Love" (1620), and “ Observations in Foreign Travels " (1626). Later, much that must be spurious was added to the gathering snowball of Overbury's Works. Posterity has found the praise of his contemporaries for the sententious and graceful moral verse of Overbury extravagantly expressed. The Wife is smooth and elegant, but uninspired. There is no question that the horrible death of the writer, and the extraordinary way in which his murderers were brought to justice, gave an extraneous charm to his writings. Nor can we be quite sure that Overbury was in fact such a "glorious constellation" of all the religious virtues as the 17th century believed. He certainly kept very bad company, and positive evidence of his goodness is wanting. But no one was ever more transcendently canonized by becoming the victim of conspirators whose crimes were equally detestable and unpopular. (E. G.) OVERDOOR, the name given to any ornamental moulding placed over a door. The overdoor is usually architectural in form, but is sometimes little more than a moulded shelf for the reception of china or curiosities. OVERMANTEL, the name given to decorative cabinet work, or joinery, applied to the upper part of a fireplace. The overmantel is derived from the carved panelling formerly applied to chimney-pieces of importance, but the word is now generally restricted to a movable fitment, often consisting of a series of shelves and niches for the reception of ornaments. OVERSOUL (Ger. Überseele), the name adopted by Emerson to describe his conception of that transcendent unity which embraces subject and object, mind and matter, and in which all the differences in virtue of which particular things exist are absorbed. The idea is analogous to the various doctrines of the absolute, and to the idea of Plato. OVERSTONE, SAMUEL JONES LOYD, 1ST BARON (17961883), English banker, the only son of the Rev. Lewis Loyd, a Welsh dissenting minister, was born on the 25th of September 1796. He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. His father, who had married a daughter of John Jones, a banker of Manchester, had given up the ministry to take a partnership in his father-in-law's bank, and had afterwards founded the London branch of Jones, Loyd & Co., afterwards incorporated in the London and Westminster Bank. Loyd, who had joined his father in the banking business, succeeded to it on the latter's retirement in 1844. He conducted the business so successfully that on his death he left personal property of over £2,000,000. He sat in parliament as liberal member for Hythe from 1819 to 1826, and unsuccessfully contested Manchester in 1832. As early as 1832 he was recognized as one of the foremost authorities on banking, and he enjoyed much influence with successive ministries and chancellors of the exchequer. He was created Baron Overstone in 1850. He died in London on the 17th of November 1883, leaving one daughter, who married Robert James Loyd-Lindsay, afterwards Lord Wantage. OVERT ACT (O. Fr. overt, from ouvrir, to open), in law, an open act, one that can be clearly proved by evidence, and from which criminal intent can be inferred, as opposed to a mere intention in the mind to commit a crime (see INTENT). The term is more particularly employed in cases of treason (9.9.), which must be demonstrated by some overt or open act. OVERTURE (Fr. ouverture, opening), in music, the instru mental introduction to a dramatic or choral composition. The notion of an overture thus has no existence until the 17th century. | The leccata at the beginning of Monteverde's Orfeo is a barbaric flourish of every procurable instrument, alternating with a melodious section entitled ritornello; and, in so far as this constitutes the first instrumental movement prefixed to an opera, it may be called an overture. As an art-form the overture began to exist in the works of J. B. Lully. He devised a scheme which, although he himself did not always adhere to it, constitutes the typical French overture up to the time of Bach and Handel (whose works have made it classical). This French overture short self-contained movement founded on the music of the consists of a slow introduction in a marked "dotted rhythm" | (i.e. exaggerated iambic, if the first chord is disregarded), followed by a lively movement in fugato style. The slow introduction was always repeated, and sometimes the quick movement concluded by returning to the slow tempo and material, and was also repeated (see Bach's French Overture in the Klavierübung) The operatic French overture was frequently followed by a series of dance tunes before the curtain rose. It thus naturally became used as the prelude to a suite; and the Klavierübung French Overture of Bach is a case in point, the overture proper being the introduction to a suite of seven dances. For the same reason Bach's four orchestral suites are called overtures; and, again, the prelude to the fourth partita in the Klavierübung is an overture. Bach was able to use the French overture form for choruses, and even for the treatment of chorales. Thus the overture, properly so called, of his fourth orchestral suite became the first chorus of the church cantata Unser Mund sei voll Lachens; the choruses of the cantatas Preise Jerusalem den Herrn and Höchst erwünschtes Freudenfest are in overture form; and, in the first of the two cantatas entitled Nun komm der Heiden Heiland, Bach has ingeniously adapted the overture form to the treatment of a chorale. With the rise of dramatic music and the sonata style, the French overture became unsuitable for opera; and Gluck (whose remarks on the function of overtures in the preface to Alceste are historic) based himself on Italian models, of loose texture, which admit of a sweeping and massively contrasted technique (see SYMPHONY). By the time of Mozart's later works the overture in the sonata style had clearly differentiated itself from strictly symphonic music. It consists of a quick movement (with or❘ without a slow introduction), in sonata form, loose in texture, without repeats, frequently without a development section, but sometimes substituting for it a melodious episode in slow time. Instances of this substitution are Mozart's" symphony" in G (Köchel's catalogue 318), which is an overture to an unknown opera, and his overtures to Die Entführung and to Lo Sposo deluso, in both of which cases the curtain rises at a point which throws a remarkable dramatic light upon the peculiar form. The overture to Figaro was at first intended to have a similar slow middle section, which, however, Mozart struck out as soon as he had begun it. In Beethoven's hands the overture style and form increased its distinction from that of the symphony, | but it no longer remained inferior to it; and the final version of the overture to Leonora (that known as No. 3) is the most | gigantic single orchestral movement ever based on the sonata style. Overtures to plays, such as Beethoven's to Collin's Coriolan, naturally tend to become detached from their surroundings; and hence arises the concert overture, second only to the symphony in importance as a purely orchestral art-form. Its derivation associates it almost inevitably with external poetic ideas. These, if sufficiently broad, need in no way militate against musical integrity of form; and Mendelssohn's Hebrides overture is as perfect a masterpiece as can be found in any art. The same applies to Brahms's Tragic Overture, one of his greatest orchestral works, for which a more explanatory title would be misleading as well as unnecessary. His Academic Festival Overture is a highly organized working out of German student more definite than that portion of the music which takes place OVERYSEL, or OVERYSSEL, a province of Holland, bounded S. and S.W. by Gelderland, N.W. by the Zuider Zee, N. by Friesland and Drente, and E. by the Prussian provinces of Hanover and Westphalia respectively; area 1291 sq. m.; pop. (1904) 359,443. It includes the island of Schokland in the Zuider Zee. Like Drente on the north and Gelderland on the south, Overysel consists of a sandy flat relieved by hillocks, and is covered with waste stretches of heath and patches of wood and high fen. Along the shores of the Zuider Zee, however, west of the Zwolle-Leeuwarden railway, the country is low-lying and covered for the most part with fertile pasture lands. Cattlerearing and butter and cheese making are consequently the chief occupations, while on the coast many of the people are engaged in making mats and besoms. The river system of the province is determined by two main ridges of hills. The first of these extends from the southern border at Markelo to the Lemeler hill (262 ft.) near the confluence of the Vecht and Regge, and forms the watershed between the Regge and the Salland streams (Sala, whence Salis, Isala, Ysel), which unite at Zwolle to form the Zwarte Water. The other ridge of hills extends through the south-eastern division of the province called Twente, from Enschede to Ootmarsum, and divides the basin of the Almelosche Aa from the Dinkel and its streams. The river Vecht crosses the province from E. to W. and joins the Zwarte Water, which communicates with the Zuider Zee by the Zwolsche Diep and with the Ysel by the Willemsvaart. Everywhere along the streams is a strip of fertile grass-land, from which agriculture and cattlerearing have gradually spread over the sand-grounds. A large proportion of the sand-grounds, however, is waste. Forest culture is practised on parts of them, especially in the east, and pigs are largely bred. The deposits of the Salland and the Dinkel streams are found to contain iron ore, which is extracted and forms an article of export to Germany. Peat-digging and fen reclamation have been carried on from an early period, and the area of high fen which formerly covered the portion of the province to the north of the Vecht in the neighbourhood of Dedemsvaart has been mostly reclaimed. This industry is | times delighted his ears with the music of his verse. He had a now most active on the eastern borders between Almelo and Hardenberg, Vriezenveen being the chief fen colony. Cottonspinning, together with bleaching-works, has come into prominence in the 19th century in the district of Twente. The reason of its isolated settlement here is to be found in the former general practice of weaving as a home craft and its organization as an industry by capitalist Baptist refugees who arrived in the 17th and 18th centuries. The chief town of the province is Zwolle, and other thriving industrial centres are Deventer, famous for its carpets and cake, and Almelo, Enschede, Hengelo and Oldenzaal in Twente. Kampen, Genemuiden, Vollenhove and Blokzyl, on the Zuider Zee, carry on some fishing trade. Near Vollenhove was the castle of Toutenburg, built in 1502-1533 by the famous stadtholder of the emperor Charles V., George Schenk. The castle was demolished in the beginning of the 19th century and the remains are slight. The railway system of the province is supplemented by steam tram-lines between Zwolle, Dedemsvaart and Hardenberg. OVID [PUBLIUS OVIDIUS NASO] (43 B.C.-A.D. 17), Roman poet, the last of the Augustan age, was born in 43 B.C., the last year of the republic, the year of the death of Cicero. Thus the only form of political life known to Ovid was that of the absolute rule of Augustus and his successor. His character was neither strengthened nor sobered, like that of his older contemporaries, by personal recollection of the crisis through which the republic passed into the empire. There is no sense of political freedom in his writings. The spirit inherited from his ancestors was that of the Italian country districts, not that of Rome. He was born on the 20th of March (his self-consciousness has preserved the exact day of the month)1 at Sulmo, now Sulmona, a town of the Paeligni, picturesquely situated among the mountains of the Abruzzi: its wealth of waters and natural beauties seem to have strongly affected the young poet's imagination (for he often speaks of them with affectionate admiration) and to have| quickened in him that appreciative eye for the beauties of nature which is one of the chief characteristics of his poems. The Paeligni were one of the four small mountain peoples whose proudest memories were of the part they had played in the Social War. But in spite of this they had no old race-hostility with Rome, and their opposition to the senatorial aristocracy in the Social War would predispose them to accept the empire. Ovid, whose father was of equestrian family, belonged by birth to the same social class as Tibullus and Propertius, that of old hereditary landowners; but he was more fortunate than they in the immunity which his native district enjoyed from the confiscations made by the triumvirs. His vigorous vitality was apparently a gift transmitted to him by heredity; for he tells us that his father lived till the age of ninety, and that he performed the funeral rites to his mother after his father's death. While he mentions both with the piety characteristic of the old Italian, he tells us little more about them than that "their thrift curtailed his youthful expenses," and that his father did what he could to dissuade him from poetry, and force him into the more profitable carcer of the law. He and his brother had been brought early to Rome for their education, where they attended the lectures of two most eminent teachers of rhetoric, Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro, to which influence is due the strong rhetorical element in Ovid's style. He is said to have attended these lectures eagerly, and to have shown in his exercises that his gift was poetical rather than oratorical, and that he had a distaste for the severer processes of thought. Like Pope, "he lisped in numbers," and he wrote and destroyed many verses before he published anything. The earliest edition of the Amores, which first appeared in five books, and the Heroides were given by him to the world at an early age. "Virgil," he informs us, "he had only seen "; but Virgil's friend and contemporary Aemilius Macer used to read his didactic poems to him; and even the fastidious Horace some1 Trist. iv. 10. 13. Am. i. 3. 10. Trist. iv. 10. 26 et quod temptabam scribere, versus erat." 44 names to us. close bond of intimacy with the younger poets of the older generation-Tibullus, whose death he laments in one of the few pathetic pieces among his earlier writings, and Propertius, to whom he describes himself as united in the close ties of comradeship. The name of Maecenas he nowhere mentions. The time of his influence was past when Ovid entered upon his poetical career. But the veteran politician Messalla, the friend of Tibullus, together with his powerful son Cotta Messallinus and Fabius Maximus, who are mentioned together by Juvenal◄ along with Maecenas as types of munificent patrons of letters, and other influential persons whose names are preserved in the Epistles from Pontus, encouraged his literary efforts and extended to him their support. He enjoyed also the intimacy of poets and literary men, chiefly of the younger generation, whose names he enumerates in Ex Ponto, iv. 16, though, with the exception of Domitius Marsus and Grattius, they are scarcely more than With the older poet, Macer, he travelled for more than a year. Whether this was immediately after the completion of his education, or in the interval between the publication of his earlier poems and that of the Medea and Ars amatoria is unknown, but it is in his later works, the Fasti and Metamorphoses, that we chiefly recognize the impressions of the scenes he visited. In one of the Epistles from Pontus (ii. 10) to his fellow-traveller there is a vivid record of the pleasant time they had passed together. Athens was to a Roman then what Rome is to an educated Englishman of the present day. Ovid speaks of having gone there under the influence of literary enthusiasm, and a similar impulse induced him to visit the supposed site of Troy. The two friends saw together the illustrious cities of Asia, which had inspired the enthusiasm of travel in Catullus, and had become familiar to Cicero and Horace during the years they passed abroad. They spent nearly a year in Sicily, which attracted him, as it had attracted Lucretius and Virgil, by its manifold charm of climate, of sea-shore and inland scenery, and of legendary and poetical association. He recalls with a fresh sense of pleasure the incidents of their tour, and the endless delight which they had in each other's conversation. We would gladly exchange the record of his life of pleasure in Rome for more of these recollections. The highest type of classic Roman culture shows its affinity to that of modern times by nothing more clearly than the enthusiasm for travel among lands famous for their natural beauty, their monuments of art and their historical associations. When settled at Rome, although a public career leading to senatorial position was open to him, and although he filled various minor judicial posts and claims to have filled them well, he had no ambition for such distinction, and looked upon pleasure and poetry as the occupations of his life. He was three times married; when little more than a boy to his first wife, whom he naïvely describes as unworthy of himself:7 but he was soon separated from her and took a second wife, with whom his union, although through no fault of hers, did not last long. She was probably the mother of his one daughter. Later he was joined to a third wife, of whom he always speaks with affection and respect. She was a lady of the great Fabian house, and thus connected with his powerful patron Fabius Maximus, and was a friend of the empress Livia. It therefore seems likely that he may have been admitted into the intimacy of the younger society of the Palatine, although in the midst of his most fulsome flattery he does not claim ever to have enjoyed the favour of Augustus. His liaison with his mistress Corinna, whom he celebrates in the Amores, took place probably in the period between his first and second, or between his second and third marriages. It is doubtful whether Corinna was, like Catullus' Lesbia, a lady of recognized position, or whether she belonged to vii. 95. Lucret. i. 726 4 quae cum magna modis multis miranda videtur Sueton. (Donatus), Vila Virg. 13 "quamquam secessu Cam paniae Siciliaeque plurimum uteretur.' Trist. iv. 10. 69-70. the same class as the Chloes and Lalages of Horace's artistic fancy. If we can trust the poet's later apologies for his life, in which he states that he had never given occasion for any serious scandal, it is probable that she belonged to the class of libertinae. However that may be, Ovid is not only a less constant but he is a less serious lover than his great predecessors Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius. His tone is that either of mere sensuous feeling or of irony. In his complete emancipation from all restraint he goes beyond them, and thus reflects the tastes and spirit of fashionable Rome between the years 20 B.C. and the beginning of our era. Society was then bent simply on amusement; and, as a result partly of the loss of political interests, women came to play a more important and brilliant part in its life than they had done before. Julia, the daughter of the emperor, was by her position, her wit and beauty, and her reckless dissipation, the natural leader of such a society. But the discovery of her intrigue (2 B.C.) with Iulus Antonius, the son of Mark Antony, was deeply resented by Augustus as being at once a shock.to his affections and a blow to his policy of moral reform. Julia was banished and disinherited; Antonius and her many lovers were punished; and the Roman world awoke from its fool's paradise of pleasure. Nearly coincidently with this scandal appeared Ovid's Ars amatoria, perhaps the most immoral work ever written by a man of genius, though not the most demoralizing, since it is entirely free from morbid sentiment. By its brilliancy and heartlessness it appealed to the prevailing taste of the fashionable world; but its appearance excited deep resentment in the mind of the emperor, as is shown by his edict, issued ten years later, against the book and its author. Augustus had the art of dissembling his anger; and Ovid appears to have had no idea of the storm that was gathering over him. He still continued to enjoy the society of the court and the fashionable world; he passed before the emperor in the annual procession among the ranks of the equites; and he developed a richer vein of genius than he had shown in his youthful prime. But he was aware that public opinion had been shocked, or professed to be shocked, by his last work; and after writing a kind of apology for it, called the Remedia amoris, he turned to other subjects, and wrote during the next ten years the Metamorphoses and the Fasti. He had already written the Heroides, in which he had imparted a modern and romantic interest to the heroines of the old mythology, and a tragedy, the Medea, which must have afforded greater scope for the dramatic and psychological treatment of the passion with which he was most familiar. In the Fasti Ovid assumes the position of a national poet by imparting poetical life and interest to the ceremonial observances of the Roman religion; but it is as the brilliant narrator of the romantic tales that were so strangely blended with the realistic annals of Rome that he succeeds in the part assumed by him. The Metamorphoses is a narrative poem which recounts legends in which the miraculous involved transformations of shape. Beginning with the change from Chaos to Cosmos, legends first Greek and then Roman are passed in review, concluding with the metamorphosis of Julius Caesar into a star and a promise of immortality to Augustus. The long series of stories, which consist to a large extent of tales of the love adventures of the gods with nymphs and the daughters of men, is strongly tinged with Alexandrine influence, being in fact a succession of epyllia in the Alexandrine manner. This work, which Ovid regards as' his most serious claim to immortality, had not been finally revised at the time of his disgrace, and in his despair he burnt it; but other copies were in existence, and when he was at Tomi it was published at Rome by one of his friends. He often regrets that it had not received his final revision. The Fasti also was broken off by his exile, after the publication of the first six books, treating of the first six months of the year. Ovid assigns two causes for his banishment, his Ars amatoria, and an actual offence. What this was is not known, but his The essentially modern character of the work appears in his making a heroine of the time of the Trojan war speak of visiting learned " Athens (Heroid. ii. 83). "Animos ad publica carmina flexi" (Trist. v. 1. 23). Trish ii. 207. All frequent references to it enable us to conjecture its character. He tells us that there was no breach of law on his part; he distinctly disclaims having been concerned in any treasonable plot: his fault was a mistake of judgment (error), an unpremeditated act of folly. He had been an unintentional witness of some culpable act committed by another or others--of some act which nearly affected the emperor, and the mention of which was likely to prove offensive to him. Ovid himself had reaped no personal gain from his conduct. Though his original act was a pardonable error, he had been prevented by timidity from atoning for it subsequently by taking the straightforward course. In a letter to an intimate friend, to whom he had been in the habit of confiding all his secrets, he says that had he confided this one he would have escaped condemnation. In writing to another friend he warns him against the danger of courting too high society. This offence, which excited the anger of Augustus, was connected in some way with the publication of the Ars amatoria, since that fact was recited by the emperor in his sentence. this points to his having been mixed up in a scandal affecting the imperial family, and seems to connect him with one event, coincident with the time of his disgrace (A.D. 9), the intrigue of the younger Julia, granddaughter of Augustus, with D. Silanus, mentioned by Tacitus. Augustus deeply felt these family scandals, looking upon them as acts of treason and sacrilege. Julia was banished to the island of Trimerus, off the coast of Apulia. Silanus withdrew into voluntary exile. The chief punishment fell on Ovid, who was banished. The poet at the worst could only have been a confidant of the intrigue; but Augustus must have regarded him and his works as, if not the corrupter of the age, at least the most typical representative of that corruption which had tainted so direly even the imperial family. Ovid's form of banishment was the mildest possible (relegatio); it involved no deprivation of civic rights, and left him the possession of his property. He was ordered to remove to the half-Greek, half-barbaric town of Tomi, near the mouth. of the Danube. He recounts vividly the agony of his last night in Rome, and the hardships of his November voyage down the Adriatic and up the Gulf of Corinth to Lechaeum, where he crossed the isthmus and took ship again from Cenchreae to Samothrace, whence in the following spring he proceeded overland through Thrace to his destination. For eight years he bore up in his dreary solitude, suffering from the unhealthiness of the climate and the constant alarm of inroads of barbarians. In the hope of procuring a remission of his punishment he wrote poetical complaints, first in the series of the five books of the Tristia, sent successively to Rome, addressed to friends whose names he suppresses; afterwards in a number of poetical epistles, the Epistulae ex Ponto, addressed by name to friends who were likely to have influence at court. He believed that Augustus had softened towards him before his death, but his successor Tiberius was inexorable to his appeals. His chief consolation was the exercise of his art, though as time goes on he is painfully conscious of failure in power. But although the works written by him in exile lack the finished art of his earlier writings, their personal interest is greater. They have, like the letters of Cicero to Atticus, the fascination exercised by those works which have been given to the world under the title of Confessions; they are a sincere literary expression of the state of mind produced by a unique experience that of a man, when well advanced in years but still retaining extraordinary sensibility to pleasure and pain, withdrawn from a brilliant social and intellectual position, and cast upon his own resources in a place and among people affording the dreariest contrast to the brightness of his previous life. How far these confidences are to be regarded as equally sincere expressions of his affection or admiration for his correspondents is another question. Even in those addressed to his wife, though he speaks of her with affection and respect, there may perhaps be detected a certain ring of insincerity in his conventional comparisons of her to the Penelopes and Laodamias of ancient legend. Had she been a Penelope or Laodamia she would have accompanied him in Trist. iii. 6. II. Ann. iii. 24. superficial aspects of life, he has added few great thoughts to the intellectual heritage of the world. But with all the levity of his character he must have had qualities which made him, if not much esteemed, yet much liked in his own day, and which are apparent in the genial amiability of his writings. He claims for himself two virtues highly prized by the Romans, fides and candor-the qualities of social honour and kindly sincerity. There is no indication of anything base, ungenerous or morose in his relations to others. Literary candor, the generous appreciation of all sorts of excellence, he possesses in a remarkable degree. He heartily admires everything in literature, Greek or Roman, that had any merit. In him more than any of the Augustan poets we find words of admiration applied to the rude genius of Ennius and the majestic style of Accius. It is by him, not by Virgil or Horace, that Lucretius is first named and his sublimity is first acknowledged. The image of Catullus that most haunts the imagination is that of the poet who died so early"hedera iuvenalia cinctus his exile, as we learn from Tacitus was done by other wives' | ing a great and serious whole. Though a keen observer of the in the more evil days of which he wrote the record. The letters, which compose the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, are addressed either to his wife, the emperor, or the general reader, or to. his patrons and friends. To his patrons he writes in a vein of supplication, beseeching them to use their influence on his behalf. To his rather large circle of intimate acquaintances he writes in the language of familiarity, and often of affectionate regard; he seeks the sympathy of some, and speaks with bitterness of the coldness of others, and in three poems he complains of the relentless hostility of the enemy who had contributed to procure his exile, and whom he attacked in the Ibis. There is a note of true affection in the letter to the young lyric poetess Perilla, of whose genius and beauty he speaks with pride, and whose poetic talents he had fostered by friendly criticism. He was evidently a man of gentle and genial manners; and, as his active mind induced him to learn the language of the new people among whom he was thrown, his active interest in life enabled him to gain their regard and various marks of honour. One of his last acts was to revise the Fasti, and re-edit it with a dedication to Germanicus. The closing lines of the Epistulae ex Ponto sound like the despairing sigh of a drowning man who had long struggled alone with the waves: "Omnia perdidimus: tantummodo vita relicta est, Praebeat ut sensum materiamque mali.” Shortly after these words were written he died in his sixty-first year in A.D. 17, the fourth year of the reign of Tiberius. Tempora," as he is represented by Ovid coming to meet the shade of the young Tibullus in Elysium. To his own contemporaries, known and unknown to fame, he is as liberal in his words of recognition." He enjoyed society too in a thoroughly amiable and unenvious spirit. He lived on a friendly footing with a large circle of men of letters, poets, critics, grammarians, &c., but he showed none of that sense of superiority which is manifest in Horace's estimate The temperament of Ovid, as indicated in his writings, has of the "tribes of grammarians" and the poetasters of his day. more in common with the suppleness of the later Italian than Like Horace too he courted the society of the great, though with the strength and force of the ancient Roman. That stamp probably not with equal independence; but unlike Horace be of her own character and understanding which Rome impressed expresses no contempt for the humbler world outside. With on the genius of those other races which she incorporated with his irony and knowledge of the world it might have been expected herself is fainter in Ovid than in any other great writer. He that he would become the social satirist of his age. But be ostentatiously disclaims the manliness which in the republican lacked the censorious and critical temper, and the admixture times was regarded as the birthright not of Romans only but of gall necessary for a successful satirist. In his exile he did of the Sabellian races from which he sprang. He is as devoid of retaliate on one enemy and persistent detractor in the Ibis, a dignity in his abandonment to pleasure as in the weakness with poem written in imitation of a similar work by Callimachus; which he meets calamity. He has no depth of serious conviction, but the Ibis is not a satire, but an invective remarkable rather no vein of sober reflection, and is sustained by no great or elevat- for recondite learning than for epigrammatic sting. ing purpose. Although the beings of a supernatural world fill a large place in his writings, they appear stripped of all sanctity and mystery. It is difficult to say whether the tone of his references to the gods and goddesses of mythology implies a kind of half-believing return to the most childish elements of paganism, or is simply one of mocking unbelief. He has absolutely no reverence, and consequently inspires no reverence in his reader. With all a poet's feeling for the life, variety and subtlety of nature, he has no sense of her mystery and majesty. The love which he celebrates is sensual and superficial, a matter of vanity as much as of passion. He prefers the piquant attraction of falsehood and fickleness to the charm of truth and constancy. Even where he follows the Roman tendencies in his art he perverts them. The Fasti is a work conceived in the prosaic spirit of Roman antiquarianism. It is redeemed from being prosaic by the picturesqueness and vivacity with which the legends are told. But its conception might have been more poetical if it had been penetrated by the religious and patriotic spirit with which Virgil invests ancient ceremonies, and the mysticism with which he accepts the revelations of science. In this respect the contrast is great between the reverential treatment which the trivialities of legend and science receive in the Georgics and Aeneid, and the literal definiteness of the Fasti. These defects in strength and gravity show a corresponding result in Ovid's writings. Though possessing diligence, perseverance and literary ambition, he seems incapable of conceiv1 Tac. Hist. i. 3 "comitatae profugos liberos matres, secutae maritos in exilia coniuges." But Ovid's chief personal endowment was his vivacity, and his keen interest in and enjoyment of life. He had no grain of discontent in his composition; no regrets for an ideal past, or longings for an imaginary future. The age in which he lived was, as he tells us, that in which more than any other he would have wished to live. He is its most gifted representative, but he does not rise above it. The great object of his art was to amuse and delight it by the vivid picture he presented of its fashions and pleasures, and by creating a literature of romance which reflected them, and which could stimulate the curiosity and fascinate the fancy of a society too idle and luxurious for serious intellectual effort. The sympathy which he felt for the love adventures of his contemporaries, to which he probably owed his fall, quickened his creative power in the composition of the Heroides and the romantic tales of the Metamorphoses. None of the Roman poets can people a purely imaginary world with such spontaneous fertility of fancy as Ovid. In heart and mind he is inferior to Lucretius and Catullus, to Virgil and Horace, perhaps to Tibullus and Propertius; but in the power and range of imaginative vision he is surpassed by no ancient and by few modern poets. This power of vision is the counterpart of his lively sensuous nature. He has a keener eye for the apprehension of outward beauty, for the life and colour and forms of nature, than any Roman or perhaps than any Greek poet. This power, acting upo the wealth of his varied reading, gathered with eager curiosity and received into a singularly retentive mind, has enabled him to depict with consummate skill and sympathy legendary scenes of the most varied and picturesque beauty. If his tragedy, the There are found in him some exceptionally fine expressions, such as Her. iii. 106 "qui bene pro patria cum patriaque iacent and Met. vii. 20 " video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor." Am. i. 15. 19 ff. Am. iii. 9. 61. Ex Ponto, iv. 16. Ars amatoria, iii. 121 ff. |