CHAPTER III. PROPERTIUS AS A SINGER OF NATIONAL ANNALS AND BIOGRAPHY. In the ninth elegy of the fourth book, Propertius had promised, under the guidance and example of Mæcenas, to dedicate his Muse to grander and more national themes. He had encouraged the hope that he would some day Sing lofty Palatine where browsed the steer Rome's battlements made strong through Remus slain-The royal Twins the she-wolf came to rear And loftier themes than these, shouldst thou ordain : I'll sing our triumphs won in East and West, And Antony's self-murder in defeat:”—C. and that hope he appears to have satisfied in the latter years of his life by re-editing some of his earlier Roman poems, and enlarging the list of them by added elegies. In the first half of the first elegy of his last book appears a sort of proem to a volume of Roman 'Fasti,' to which were to belong such elegies as "Vertumnus," 66 Tarpeia," the "Ara Maxima" of Hercules, and the "Legend of Jupiter Feretrius," and the "Spolia Opima," as well as such stirring later ballads of the empire in embryo as the "Battle of Actium." It would seem that the poet was either disinclined for his task or dissatisfied with his success; for it is probable that most of those we have enumerated are but revised and retouched copies of earlier work, whilst the gems of the book, "Arethuse to Lycotas" and "Cornelia," are in another vein, of another stamp, and, as it seems to us, of a more mellow and perfect finish. That Propertius never approached the task of historic elegy with his whole heart, or even with the liveliness and versatility with which Ovid afterwards handled kindred topics in his 'Fasti,' peeps out from the abrupt cutting short of the "Early History of Rome" in the first elegy, and the supplement to it in a wholly different vein, where we are introduced to a Babylonian seer, and made acquainted with several data of the poet's personal history. The earlier portion has been ascribed to the period before his connection with Cynthia the latter, which is not now to our purpose, belongs to his later revision-period. Perhaps it was the grandness of the programme that eventually convinced him of its intractability; yet none can regret that the poet did not burn the half-dozen proofs of what he might have achieved as a poetic annalist or legend-weaver. To take for example the first elegy— from the version of Mr Paley, who in these Roman elegies is always accurate and often not unpoeticalthere is fancy and picturesqueness in the description of the olden abode of the founders of Rome on the Palatine, which was twice burnt in the reign of Augustus, but the commemoration of which was dear to the powers that were in Propertius's day: "Where on steps above the valley Remus' cottage rises high, Brothers twain one hearthstone made a mighty principality. By that pile, where now the senate sits in bordered robes arrayed, Once a band of skin-clad fathers, clownish minds, their council made. Warned by notes of shepherd's bugle there the old Quirites met; Many a time that chosen hundred congress held in meadows wet. O'er the theatre's wide bosom then no flapping awning swung ; O'er the stage no saffron essence cool and grateful fragrance flung. None cared then for rites external, none did foreign gods import, Native sacrifice the simple folk in fear and trembling sought. No Parilia then the people kept with heaps of lighted hay, Now with horse's blood we render lustral rites of yesterday." -(V. i. 10-20.) The Parilia, or Palilia, was the rural festival already described in the third chapter of the sketch of Tibullus (p. 126), and a contrast is intended here between the rude bonfire of early days and the later lustration, for which the blood of the October horse was de règle. The poet proceeds to surround early Rome with all the proud vaunts of its legendary history-its Dardan origin, its accretions from the Sabine warriors and Tuscan settlers, its glory in the legend of the shewolf: "Nought beyond the name to Roman nursling from his kin remains: Save that from the wolf that reared him wolfish blood he still retains" a sentiment which Lord Macaulay embodies in his "Prophecy of Capys:" "But thy nurse will bear no master, Thy nurse will bear no load, When all the pack, loud baying, The historic part of the elegy closes with a fine rhapsody, in which its author aspires to the glories of a nobler Ennius, and repeats his less ambitious claim to rank as the Roman Callimachus. In the second elegy of this book, Vertumnus, the god of the changing year, is introduced to correct wrong notions as to his name, functions, and mythology, with an evident penchant for that infant etymology which is so marked a feature in the Fasti' of Ovid. In the fourth- -a most beautiful and finished elegy-the love-story of Tarpeia, if an early poem, has been so retouched as to make us regret that Propertius had not resolution to go on with his rivalry of "father" Ennius. It opens with a description of the wooded dell of the Capitoline hill, beneath the Tarpeian rock where, to the native fancy, La - "Oft now the guiltless moon dire omens gave, That Roman spear that handsome face might spare:" and so often did she brood and soliloquise over her "To slack the watch the chief his guards had told, |