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rude and licentious composer, and to consider the polished but monotonous Ovidian distich as the standard of excellence. Our best writers of Latin elegy have generally preferred a certain neatness and prettiness, a harmony and a fine finish, to a nervous and pointed expression. Thus there is much that is taking, but little that is striking, in modern compositions. The use of words of four or five syllables at the end of the pentameter is held to be a licence. Propertius on the contrary thought it an important element of beauty: and the Greeks, no mean judges of the rò kaλòv, evidently thought so too. It may be questioned if a rule arbitrarily but rigidly drawn should not be relaxed, and the proscription confined to words of three syllables. Take the opening lines of the first book as an illustration:

Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis,
Contactum nullis ante cupidinibus.

Tum mihi constantis dejecit lumina fastus,
Et caput impositis pressit Amor pedibus,
Donec me docuit castas odisse puellas

Improbus, et nullo vivere consilio.

Here the fourth verse alone, metrically considered, is not pleasing. But let the following passage* be examined with attention, and it cannot fail to strike the reader of taste and judgment as singularly beautiful :—

Ille sub extrema pendens secluditur ala,

Et volucres ramo submovet insidias.
Jam Pandioniæ cessat genus Orithyiæ :

Ah dolor! ibat Hylas, ibat Hamadryasin.
Hic erat Arganthi Pege sub vertice montis,
Grata domus Nymphis humida Thyniasin :

*Book i. El. 20, 29-42.

Quam supra nullæ pendebant debita curæ
Roscida purpureis poma sub arboribus ;
Et circum irriguo surgebant lilia prato,

Candida purpureis mixta papaveribus ;
Quæ modo decerpens tenero pueriliter ungui
Proposito florem prætulit officio;

Et modo formosis incumbens nescius undis

Errorem blandis tardat imaginibus.

It cannot be doubted that the long words at the end of the pentameters in the above passage were studiously introduced. Every distich is elaborately constructed on that principle. And those who would object to such verses as inharmonious must have a very limited or a very erroneous conception of the capabilities of descriptive elegiac verse. It is a circumstance worthy of attention, that in the fifth book, which contains the poet's earliest compositions, this peculiarity very seldom occurs.* It was therefore deliberately adopted as an improvement, and that too in a part of his work which exhibits internal evidence of having received a more careful revision and a more skilful touch than any other.

Still, we must not forget that Propertius can hardly be called a genuine Roman poet. Avowedly copying the Greek models, Callimachus of Cyrene and Philetas of Cos, -then generally regarded with especial favour by the libertines of Rome,†-and deeply imbued with the Alexandrine learning, which was as popular in patrician Rome as French literature is with us, he is by no means free from

* It is true that the latest and perhaps the finest poem (v. El. 11) does not contain a single instance of a word of more than two syllables at the end of the pentameter. The fact seems to be, that Latin elegy, left to its own genius, naturally subsides into

the monotonous dissyllabic clause of the distich, while the Greek as naturally adopts long final words.

† Ovid, Remed. Am. 759. 'Callimachum fugito; non est inimicus amori ; Et cum Callimacho tu quoque, Coe, noces.'

the fault of making a display of legendary Greek lore to a degree which is not far removed from pedantry. Of the extent of his reading we have evidence in the fact that in not a few places he has followed the accounts of Greek authors now wholly lost. The fault however was that of the age rather than of the individual. Such was the fondness of the Romans under the empire for Greek poetry, that the most hackneyed myths seem never to have come amiss. Grecian heroes and heroines were the stock in trade of every poet, the delight of every audience. To know something of Greek was to be a savant; and to win the tergeminum sophos at a recitation was not difficult for one who took advantage of the vanity of his hearers. The Augustan poets complimented each other as docti on this ground. The absence of any other sort of foreign literature beside the Greek tended materially to impress this stamp of sameness on almost all Roman poetry of the Augustan and subsequent period:

‘Nota magis nulli domus est sua, quam mihi lucus
Martis, et Æoliis vicinum rupibus antrum
Vulcani. Quid agant venti: quas torqueat umbras

*Ovid, Amor. iii. 9, 61.

Obvius huic venias, hedera juvenilia cinctus
Tempora, cum Calvo, docte Catulle, tuo.
The fact, that all Roman literature is
borrowed from the Greek, has been
perhaps more fully appreciated by
young students since Mr. Macaulay
wrote his justly famous Preface to
'Lays of Ancient Rome.' His words
are these: "The Latin literature which
has come down to us is of later date
than the commencement of the second
Punic war, and consists almost ex-
clusively of works fashioned on Greek
models. The Latin metres, heroic,
elegiac, lyric, and dramatic, are of

Greek origin. The best Latin epic poetry is the feeble echo of the Iliad and Odyssey. The best Latin eclogues are imitations of Theocritus. The plan of the most finished didactic poem in the Latin tongue was taken from Hesiod. The Latin tragedies are bad copies of the masterpieces of Sophocles and Euripides. The Latin comedies are free translations from Demophilus, Menander, and Apollodorus. The Latin philosophy was borrowed, without alteration, from the Portico and the Academy; and the great Latin orators constantly proposed to themselves as

Eacus; unde alius furtivæ devehat aurum
Pelliculæ ; quantas jaculetur Monychus ornos,

Frontonis platani convulsaque marmora clamant
Semper, et assiduo ruptæ lectore columnæ.*

Propertius, however, though a slave, and a servile one, to the fashion of his age, was a true Roman at heart. His national sympathies and antipathies are often strongly and fearlessly expressed. So far as he is artificial, he is far less pleasing than when he lays aside the tinsel of Greek learning, and gives vent to his naturally fine feelings in simple and touching and truly native strains.† Partly from this affectation of learning, partly, perhaps, from the same cause which imparts so much difficulty to the writings of Tacitus, the desire to avoid common-place expressions, but still more from a genius which was impatient of restraint, the poems of Propertius are often very obscure. In this respect he is the Eschylus of the Roman Muse; a writer who cannot be thoroughly understood without attentive study of his peculiar style and constructions. Of him almost as truly as of Persius it might have been said, si non vis intelligi, non debes legi. A young poet and a hasty composer, often writing under the excitement of jealousy and disappointment, he is frequently abrupt and impassioned in his appeals. The sudden and startling transitions, occasionally amounting to positive incoherences, greatly perplex the reader who is not prepared to meet with them. But beside the difficulty of the Latinity, the text, at least till of late years, has been left in a very unsatisfactory state. Though no one at the pre

patterns the speeches of Demosthenes and Lysias.' On the genuine Italian poetry, so far as it was represented by the Atellanæ fabulæ, the reader will do well to consult the valuable ac

count given in Varronianus, p. 132—8 (ed. 2.)

* Juven. Sat. i. 7.

As i. 17 and 18; iii. 10; iv. 13; v. 3 and 11, &c.

sent day gives any credit to an idle tale of the fifteenth century, that the only existing MS. of our poet had been found in a wine-cellar,* greatly damaged by age and damp, it is incredible what influence it formerly exercised on the critical efforts of the editors. Assuming that every known MS. had been transcribed from this one scarcely legible copy, they took it for granted that nothing but conjectural emendation could restore the text to an integrity which in fact it had never lost. Hence Scaliger and his followers, of whom Kuinoel was the last representative, introduced the most reckless, improbable, and destructive alterations and transpositions. They mistook eccentricities of style for errors of the copyists, and laboured to reduce every rough and disjointed passage to an arbitrary standard of elegance. An examination of the now carefully collected readings of the best MSS. will shew, that though Propertius has suffered somewhat from the long neglect into which his writings had fallen,† the corruption of his text had been greatly overrated. There are very few passages which are certainly and hopelessly faulty. The loss, such as it is, must be considered irreparable, since all the copies now known are evidently derived from one archetypus,‡ which was in all probability corrupt in these very places. As for the vast and perplexing mass of varia lectiones with which some editions have been encumbered, the reader

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