cadence of the verses, but in spite of this the variety of expression and the clever rhetoric employed preserve the poems from monotony. Only the sameness of subject and the lack of real feeling make the _Amores_ tedious to the modern reader. [Sidenote: The Heroides.] The subject of the _Amores_ is continued in the _Heroides_, but in a different form. Here the elegies are supposed to be letters from fifteen famous women of antiquity—Penelope, Briseïs, Phædra, and others—to their absent lovers or husbands. The form of poetic love-letter was known to the Alexandrians and had been employed once (IV, iii) by Propertius, but was first made popular at Rome by Ovid, who was also, apparently, the first to write in the character of mythological persons. Soon after the publication of Ovid’s letters from heroines, replies to some, at least, were written by Sabinus.[80] These replies are lost, but at the end of the _Heroides_ we now have three pairs of letters. Paris, Leander, and Acontius write respectively to Helen, Hero, and Cydippe, and each woman writes a reply. These six letters are so nearly in the style of Ovid that only careful study has led the best critics to the opinion that they are not his work, but clever imitations by some unknown contemporary. In the _Heroides_, as in the six letters just mentioned, the fact that the writers are well-known mythological persons lends an interest and a dramatic quality to the poems, which is wanting in the _Amores_, but the general character of the work remains the same. [Sidenote: On the Care of the Face.] The book _On the Care of the Face_ is imperfectly preserved, for it breaks off after one hundred lines. The introduction compares the highly developed culture of the Augustan period with the rough simplicity of earlier times. The maids and matrons of old may not have bestowed any care upon their personal beauty, but the Roman girls of the present must act differently, since even the men are no longer careless of their persons. To be sure, the character is more important than personal beauty, for character remains while beauty is fleeting. Up to this point the poem is attractive, but the remainder, consisting of recipes for cosmetics, with accurate directions concerning weights and measures of the various ingredients, is so uninteresting that the loss of the latter part of the poem is hardly to be regretted.