and the commands which Cynthia lays upon him imply that he exercised the rights of a master over her household. The following poem, a light comedy succeeding the tragedy of the seventh, could hardly have been written during the continuance of the serious passion. It seems to be a record of a time when she still exercised a sway over him, but when he could think of her imperious and violent temper as a subject for amusement rather than for tears. The passion which begins with joy, not unmixed with morbid complaints and repinings, runs its troubled course, growing gradually quieter and colder, till it disappears for a time, reveals itself again for a moment in the record of a disorderly debauch, and re-asserts its original intensity in the tragic sense of remorse and awe with which he recalls the memory of her who had been, as he so often calls her, his 'life,' and in a sense also his death; who, if she first inspired his poetry, marred the full development of his nature and genius.

In the poem written after the death of Cynthia he anticipates that his own end is near at hand. The elegy on Cornelia, the last poem of Book iv and probably the last finished by Propertius, proves that he lived till the year 16 B.C., but there are no grounds for supposing that he long survived that year. All through his poems, from first to last, he writes as if anticipating an early death. The passionate excitability of his temperament, so unlike the healthy sensuousness of Ovid, the extreme paleness, 'pallor amantium,' the index of that excitability, and the slightness of frame suggested in such phrases as 'exiles tenuatus in artus' (ii. 22. 21), point to a constitution not naturally fit to cope successfully with the vehement pleasures and pains of his existence. His last book was probably left unfinished at his death. The second book also gives the impression that, in its present shape at least, it was not finally arranged by himself. The passages in Pliny (Ep. vi. 15, ix. 22) which speak of the elegiac poet who claimed descent from him, leave a doubt whether, after his rupture with Cynthia and the passing of the lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus,—the law characterised by

Horace in the prosaic phraseology of the Carmen Seculare as 'prolis novae feraci'—he did not marry and leave descendants. Though the words 'inter majores numerat' might perhaps be used by one who counted him as a kinsman, the phrase 'a quo genus ducit,' seems to point to direct descent.

The only passion which vies in intensity with his love for Cynthia is his passion for fame as a poet. The two passions feed one another. The greatness of his love gives life to his poetry through the power of his poetry he hopes to win and keep the favour of his mistress. No Roman poet is more selfconscious, and none is more confident of his immortality. He anticipates his renown before he is known to the world:

Tum me non humilem mirabere saepe poetam :

Tunc ego Romanis praeferar ingeniis (i. 7. 21).

After the publication of his first book, he writes of his glory as ad hibernos lata Borysthenidas (ii. 7. 18).

He is the high priest initiated in the rites of Philetas and Callimachus, whose triumphal car is to be followed by all the other poets of love. As the fame of Homer has grown with years, so will his own fame gather strength from time:

Meque inter seros laudabit Roma nepotes:

Illum post cineres auguror ipse diem (iii. 1. 35).

It is the proud boast of Umbria that it has given birth to him; and even the wall that climbs up along the hill on which his native town is built has derived new renown from his genius. It is not by the delight in his art, 'the sweet love of the Muses,' but by the desire of recognition, that he professes to be influenced.

He expresses a genuine admiration for Virgil, but though he has some words of recognition for his predecessors in amatory poetry, Varro, Catullus, Calvus and Gallus, he has none for his eminent contemporaries, Tibullus and Ovid, with the latter of whom at least he was united by literary sympathy. He is preoccupied with his own eminence in the field which he has selected. Neither does Propertius make any allusion to Horace,

though in the second poem of Book iii he has imitated more than one passage in the Odes. Horace however has left us a study of him, which, whether true or not, is not flattering. The lines of the second epistle of Book ii. 91-101,

Carmina compono, hic elegos, &c.

6

are clearly written in reference to him. Mr. Postgate has pointed out how such phrases in this passage as 'caelatumque novem Musis opus,' quanto cum fastu quanto molimine,' 'vacuam Romanis vatibus aedem,' are characteristic of the straining after strong expression, the self-consciousness and self-assertion of him who regarded it as the chief honour of his native district that it gave birth to the Roman Callimachus, and who proclaims that Mimnermus is a greater master in love than Homer:

Plus in amore valet Mimnermi versus Homero.

The admiration expressed by Propertius for Virgil has a genuine ring; but the compliment paid to a contemporary poet, Ponticus

Primo contendis Homero (i. 7. 3)—

if it is not ironical, can only be attributed to that insatiable love of praise which Horace notes among the characteristics of the mutual admiration cliques of the day. As Propertius more than realises the weakness of the lover satirised by Horace, so too he is a living embodiment of the sensitive vanity of the poet, which the satirist has drawn from life in his Epistles. There is no ground for imputing to Horace any jealousy of the favour bestowed on a rival poet by Maecenas. The language of Propertius, though it testifies to the kindliness of the great patron of literature, to his appreciation of genius and his desire to give it a worthy direction, implies that he himself was not within the inner circle of his intimate friends, as Horace was and as Virgil and Varius had been. But though Horace may not have been of a jealous, he was of a quietly disdainful temper; and as we can understand how Tibullus, the gentle friend and comrade of the cultivated and high-minded Messalla,

was attractive to Horace by his personal and social qualities. so we can understand how both the character and the art of Propertius were distasteful to him, especially after his adoption of the ideal of a philosophic attitude towards life, and after he came to regard the wise understanding of life as the true foundation of the highest literary art. He never seems to have lost his interest in or sympathy with younger men who combined gracefully a love of pleasure with a love of literature; but Propertius was not one who could take his pleasure lightly in the spirit of Horace's earlier maxims,

nec dulces amores

Sperne puer, neque tu choreas.

As the chief representative of Alexandrianism, he must have been antagonistic to the taste of Horace for the older masters; and the admiration for his poems must have run counter to the direction into which Horace wished to guide the taste of his contemporaries. Even the exceptional and irregular force of expression in Propertius, and the vividness of his imagination, were not likely to be appreciated by so consistent a follower of the rule of moderation in art as in conduct.

While therefore attaching its proper weight to the contemporary testimony of Horace as to the personality of Propertius, we have to qualify it by a consideration of the temper of the critic and the probable grounds of the antagonism between the two poets. The offence given to Horace's common sense and social tact as a man of the world probably made him less just in his appreciation of the genius of Propertius, than he was to the young men on the staff of Tiberius. Yet the fact that Propertius is singled out for the encounter of wit and ironical compliment, seems to be a recognition that he occupies, in Horace's view, a different position from the mere herd of imitators who both irritated and amused him.

The secret of the weakness and unhappiness of Propertius, and partly also of the imperfection of his art, was that his imagination was so much stronger and more elevated than his character. An ideal of an intenser love, a more intellectual life,

career.

a happier realisation of the pleasures of art and imagination, is always conflicting with and marred by the actual disorder of his The exceptional precocity of his genius, and the early age at which his great passion began, have also to be taken into account in estimating the work which he produced. He began writing before he had any knowledge of life except that taught him by his passion; and he never afterwards succeeded in rising permanently out of the narrow groove of interests in which his life first ran. It is his concentrated devotion to Cynthia through the long period of his 'bondage' which gives a kind of unity and consistency both to his career and his art. His premature death prevented him from fully accomplishing what his genius was capable of, after the horizon of his intellectual interests was widened. His work remains as evidence how passionately, how blindly, and how unhappily an Italian of that age could love, and sacrifice all other claims and interests of life to that absorbing emotion.