I give the bare words; but the magical choice of each, the skill and beauty and music of the metre, the bloom and consecration of poetry, only the "happiness" of this great artist can render. Often as the elegiac poets, Tibullus (c. 54-c. 18 B.C.), Propertius (c. 51-16 B.C.), Ovid (43 B.C.-18 A.D.), naturally deal with the country, their distinct landscape painting is rare and apt to run upon commonplace. Tibullus has indeed much amenity; his delight, as Horace said of him, was “to "stray in silence through the healthy woodland." But not less was his pleasure in trim garden and vineyard, united with cottagers and the peaceful life of the farm, and the thought of Delia the beloved underlying all. In marked contrast with Tibullus and the poets of his period is the gloomy and powerful Propertius. The devouring passion of his life for a faithless woman seems to colour his whole mind. The fair landscape affords him no comfort or refuge; he flies to the desert, but only to pour forth his tears for Cynthia, not, like Lucretius, to adore Nature in her wild magnificence. He also dwells much after the common fashion of the ancients on the terrors and fury of the sea, as encountered in their clumsy vessels, and no compass to guide them. His was a great gift misused; Propertius, whether in his own life or poetry, failed to beat out his harmony; although, had his years been prolonged, the noble Elegy on Cornelia which concludes the book shows that he might have come not far below the peculiar Roman gravity and grandeur of Lucretius or Tacitus. Ovid, amongst world-famous poets, perhaps the least true to the soul of poetry, has left us landscape description indeed, but commonly so artificialised that it recalls only the mannered and now lifeless mythological fashions of the later Italian Renaissance. It was "the beauty of colour rather than of "form," Sellar notes, "that Ovid recognises." Exuberant as ver ubi longum tepidasque praebet invidet uvis. Od. II, vi, 5. was his fancy, the sensuous loveliness of Nature, wholly apart from its inner charm for mind or heart, was all that he could feel or reproduce. Even in the first book of the Metamorphoses -of all over-praised poems, it seems to me, over-praised the most 1-the romantic events of the new created world cannot lift him into any phrase of true feeling or picturesqueness. Even when Proserpina herself is seen gathering flowers with her comrade girls in Enna, nothing but a gardener's catalogue presents itself to Ovid's prosaic ingenuity; and Guido's one deeply inspired work, the justly famous Rospigliosi Aurora, owes nothing of its poetry to the verses which are supposed to have been the painter's text. 1 As poetry, that is. Ovid's immense profluence of varied tales, the magazine for Italian painters and sculptors during some two centuries, with his Amores, was what gave the poet his now faded supremacy. CHAPTER V LANDSCAPE IN LATER ROMAN EPIC AND THE ELOCUTIO NOVELLA THE Augustan age, after flourishing, like our Elizabethan, for about sixty years, dwindled after Ovid's death (18 A.D.), though prolonged till Nero's time, the middle of the first century. The latter half of this may be named from the imperial family, the Flavian period, and is often called the Silver Age; the most noteworthy poets here being Statius, Silius Italicus, and Martial. This last lively worldly poet-the earliest Roman known to us who made literature his profession and his livelihood (not without that degradation of writer, book, and reader, which too often follows)-yields nothing for our purpose; although his poem on the Baian Villa of a friend supplied hints to Ben Jonson in his Penshurst, and to Herrick in his beautiful Sweet Country Life. Statius has left his vast Thebaid, founded upon Vergil and published about 92 A.D. Although not an inspired work, this has much scattered merit in "graphic and picturesque "touches," and often shows true poetical feeling. I will quote from one of the minor poems a visit which he paid to the villa of his friend Vopiscus at Tivoli— 1 O day to be long remembered: . . . how gracious the natural quality of the soil! What disposition given by art of hand to the happy place! Nowhere has Nature delighted herself more liberally. Lofty woodlands overhang the rapid current; an 1 J. Conington (Essays, 1872); who characterises the poets of this period as having point and terseness, but deficient in simplicity and repose. answering deceptive image is often given back to the foliage, and one stream runs through a length of shadow.1 Very inferior is the immense Epic of Silius, longer than the Odyssey, upon the Punic War. Mackail describes him as an "incorrigible amateur," and the poem is indeed but a pedant's copy of the traditional commonplaces of the ancient epic. Yet I can give one quotation from a beautifully written simile with which he surprises us, when describing the weariness of Hannibal's troops at the monotonous glare of the snow and ice upon the summit of an Alpine pass As a sailor in mid ocean, when he has left afar the sweet firm land, and the empty sails find no breezes, and the mast is steadfast, looks out upon the measureless sea, and overcome by the watery depths, wearied, refreshes his eyes upon the open heavens.2 What we commonly think of as Latin literature now rapidly nears its extinction. Under Hadrian's principate (138-161 A.D.) the Silver Age was followed by a period when Greek was familiarly adopted as their language by Latin writers, whilst, at the same time, a new school appeared which, under the name of Elocutio Novella, created a style strangely diverse both in sentiment and in diction from the preceding classical Latin. These changes, as Mackail points out, in each case had a traceable cause. Classical Latin, with its unique gift of weighty splendour, we should always recollect, was, in truth, a highly artificial language, gradually formed and polished by suffusion of Greek influence. The stages of the literature, to review them roughly, are from Ennius about 200 B.C. to Lucretius about 50 B.C., after which comes the supreme Augustan age, say to 20 A.D. The invigorating freshness of Greek culture had then done its work and was exhausted, whence the long period of decline begins. During this time also, the peace of the early Empire had broken up, and literature found no longer powerful patrons as of old, whilst the classical dialect had parted widely from that in common use. Hence the natural direction to Greek literature on one hand, on the other the attempt to create a new mode of speech.1 2 This Elocutio Novella, beginning apparently with the prose writers, Fronto and Appuleius-both African by birth—and both living towards the close of the second century, represented "not merely a fresh refinement in the artificial manage"ment of thought and language, but the appearance on the "surface of certain native qualities in Latin," latent but long suppressed by the Graeco-Roman fashion; although, meanwhile, that style itself was developing into a subtlety, an analytic and subjective manner, in the hands of Pliny the younger and Tacitus. Quintilian had gone back to Cicero's language; 1 Mommsen, in his admirable work on the Provinces of the Empire (Bk. VIII, chap. xiii), speaking of the first Latin versions of the Bible, remarks that these translations were made, not into "the language of the cultivated circles of the 'West, which early disappeared from common life, and in the imperial age was everywhere a matter of scholastic attainment, but into the decomposed "Latin already preparing the way for the structure of the Romance languages— "the Latin of common intercourse at that time familiar to the great masses. But of the African style of Fronto and Appuleius and that circle he speaks with great contempt, seemingly treating it as a degenerate language which has fallen away from "the earnest austerity innate in Latin," strange and incongruous, with "its diffuseness of petty detail"; whence this "whole field of "Africano-Latin authorship" does not offer "a single poet who deserves to be "so much as named." With the highest respect for this great historian, I would venture to add that in this perhaps somewhat too academical judgment Mommsen passes over the interest-sometimes the charm-of that quasiromanticism traceable in the style in question, with all its weaker side. ་་ 2 Whether in sentiment or in style Tacitus is so strangely unlike his predecessors, has an appeal so direct to modern thought, that the theory once put forward assigning his historical work to a mediaeval forger-although even more absurd, if possible, than that theory which assigns Shakespeare's Drama to Lord Verulam-has a certain prima facie probability. Yet, in fact, the |