first given, in his early youth, to a beautiful young slave girl; but his heart was finally caught by the gifted but meretricious sister of a brother poet, whom he celebrates under the name of his Cynthia. She was skilled in music, poetry, and all those lighter accomplishments so well suited to captivate a youthful and susceptible mind, but she was not free from the venal indulgences which characterized the Roman ladies of her day. She gave the sighing Propertius every cause for maddening jealousy, while he, in revenge, lavished his favors indiscriminately among the courtezans who thronged the Capital.

Propertius might have competed even with Virgil in the sublime strains of the epic, had he courted the favors of Calliope rather than those of the amorous Cynthia, and he excelled Tibullus in richness of fancy and vehemence of style and expression; but he was too debauched in habit and thought to have given his genius full scope amidst the classic recesses of Helicon. The circumstances of his biography are little known, and the period of his death is undetermined; his life being wasted in a great measure, and doubtless shortened by his fatal weaknesses.

We now come to Ovid, the most agreeable, the most entertaining, and the most sparkling, if not the most gifted, of all the Roman poets of the Augustan age. Publius Ovidius, surnamed Naso, was born at the town of Sulmo, about ninety miles from Rome, in the year of the city 711. It is remarkable that he came into the world in the same year that Cicero was murdered, and on the very memorable day when the consuls Hirtius and Pansa fell at the battle of Mutina.

Our author was educated for a lawyer, and in his earlier life practised with considerable success, as well as to the satisfaction of his clients, and filled several of the inferior judicial offices. But having been educated at Athens, and having imbibed all the classic sentiment belonging to that ancient seat of literature, he forsook the temples of Themis for the service of the muses. But so strong was the opposition of his father to this mode of life, that it was not until he

had succeeded to quite an ample fortune left him by a deceased brother that Ovid abandoned his profession and betook himself to the cultivation of his native impulses; but he joined with this the enjoyment of all the giddy and voluptuous pleasures which marked the age in which he flourished. He was a great favorite with the softer sex, extremely susceptible of love, and his love was ever changing. He was thrice married, and though tenderly attached to his last noble wife, Ovid did not restrain himself from forming connexions with other fair ones, which, in the polished dialect of the French, would be termed liasions. The object of his warmest love is celebrated under the name of Corinna; a name which was borrowed and Gallicised by Madame de Stael as the title of her own famous erotic novel. Some have supposed that the poet was, under this nominal disguise, rashly paying his addresses to Julia, the fair frail daughter of the emperor; but this supposition is scarcely sustained either by chronology or plausible circumstances. The original was, doubtless, an erring and a wanton damsel, of great personal charms aud high birth, who had enticed the wayward affections of the amorous young poet.

Though surpassed by some of his compeers in dignity and purity of style, Ovid is unexcelled for fluency, elegance and graceful versatility. His principal works are the Amores, or love songs, De Arte Amandi, and its adjunct, the De Remediis Amoris, the Heroides and the celebrated Metamorphoses. The first are said to abound with all the brilliancy and freshness peculiar to young and untrained genius, as also with ingenious conceptions and tasteful images. The Art of Love has attained a world-wide celebrity, and is the pocket companion of many a luckless, musty dominie, or bashful pedant, who has the desire of love without the boldness to seek its gratification; but it has been, and must ever be, seriously censured for its pernicious counsels and sensual inculcations. The splendid, vivacious diction and the glowing fervor of versification, added to the above, are eminently calculated to inflame the young heart with inordinate passion, and to

corrode the tastes and appetites. The Remedy proposes to instruct in the means by which those who have been unsuccessful in love, or enslaved by the fretful little god, to the injury of their health or occupations, may be cured of their annoyances. It is remarkable for keen and brilliant wit, and for an extraordinary exuberance of imagination, but is not considered either so pleasing or entertaining as the first. But whatever of strength there may be in the objections urged against the use of these elegant elegiac compositions at the present time, it is absurd to suppose, as some do, that they exercised a deleterious influence on the morals of the capital city at the time they were written and published. The baleful extreme of libertinism and refined sensuality had been reached by the circles of Roman society many years before Ovid wrote, and the manners and morals of his companions, of both sexes, were scarcely susceptible of additional corruption. On the contrary, it is fairly presumable that these poems, suited in every respect to the prevailing tastes for high literary culture, elegant versification and voluptuous licenses, were written to meet the public wants and cravings, and obtained their great popularity because of their only imperfections. The Heroides are masterpieces of their kind. They are epistles supposed to be addressed by the queens and princesses of the heroic ages to the objects of their fond and vehement love, and shine forth in all the resplendence and glories of elegiac verse. Dido and Ariadne, Dejanira and Sappho, give utterance to their distresses and emotions in passionate, mournful soliloquies, and their wild yet tender strains may have harped whisperingly to the ear of Alexander Pope while penning the matchless epistle of Eloisa to Abelard. Critics have faulted them because of the tiresome uniformity in the situations and characters of the heroines, and of their injudicious length, and because, as consequent on these, a repetition of the same ideas has been occasioned, while the ceaseless tone of complaints breathed by the sighing and forsaken damsels has produced a most fatiguing and insupportable monotony. Yet the astute and discriminative Scaliger

has pronounced them to be the most perfect and polished of all Ovid's works.

The Metamorphoses are now the most admired and best known of this poet's productions. In the composition of these beautiful poems, Ovid has tastefully refrained from originality of conception. They are all fictions of the Greek and Oriental nations, slightly colored with the Latin or Etruscan fable. Had they been feigned or invented by the poet, they would have inevitably lost their principal charm; because their extravagances were too strong when viewed independent of that authority which attaches to popular credulity or received tradition. An ingenious and learned American editor has even conjectured that, in the composition of his fables, Ovid must have had an eye to many of the scriptural scenes of the Old Testament, and that he must have possessed, therefore, some knowledge of the sacred Book. This idea is sustained in copious notes, annexed to his edition of the Metamorphoses, and his similitudes, as cited, certainly evince much merit in the way of ingenuity and extended research; but whether his premise be successfully established by his conclusions, forcible though they are, may not be very readily granted, for the simple reason that if the books of the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Prophecies, and the sublime epic of Job had even really fallen under the eye of the Romans of the Augustan age, their unquestioned and startling literary excellence, even apart from the claim to divine revelation, would have fixed attention and evoked disquisition. This reason gathers strength when it is remembered that our Lord and Saviour was born within the same generation as Ovid, the miracles attending whose birth even were not known at Rome until after his crucifixion under Pilate.

The many interesting situations displayed in the Metamorphoses, have formed a perfect cornucopia for the exertion of human genius in all succeeding periods, whether in the province of narrative, or in the department of the drama and the fine arts and it is certaiu that, with the exception of the sacred Scriptures, no work has supplied so many and such

happy subjects for the pencil. In addition to this, it derives greater interest from the fact that, owing to the disappearance of all the Greek models from which Ovid imitated and borrowed, the fabulous series contained in the Metamorphoses, forms the most curious and valuable record of ancient mythology.

Ovid had not finished the correction and revision of his Metamorphoses, when, to his horror and surprise, he incurred the deep and lasting displeasure of his imperial master. Here opens a chapter of history which constitutes an enigma, the solution of which has as yet baffled, and must continue to baffle, the most industrious research of classic scholars or autiquarian inquirers. The banishment, or, as Augustus termed it, the relegation of Ovid, forms as curious and interesting a problem of history as does either the imprisonment of Tasso, or the tenant of the Iron Mask, or the authorship of Junius. The importance of the secret is infinitely enhanced from the fact that Ovid himself, though he died in exile, never dared to make it known, or even to allude to it but in the most vague terms. It was in vain that he endeavored to soften the emperor's wrath, and to procure a mitigation of his sentence. His writings composed while in exile are idolatrous rather than laudatory, as concerned Augustus, but all would not answer; and he who for more than twenty years had basked in the sunshine of court favor, and revelled with beauty, and wealth, and with the high born; who had dreamed away his prime amidst the baths, the theatres, the gay porticoes, and blooming gardens of Rome, immersed in luxury, haunted by no gloomy shadows of the future, was now doomed to die in hopeless exile, without books, or society, or comforts, with barbarians for his only companions, and in a bleak, frowning country, where spring brought no flowers or birds, and autumn no fruits, where the sun was never genial, where there was naught to refresh his memory of the soft sky and balmy atmosphere of his fatherland.

Some have imagined that he was thus punished for presuming to court an intrigue with Julia, and others, because he