Thus it appears that Ennius occasionally produced verses of considerable harmony and beauty, and that his conceptions were frequently expressed with energy and spirit. It must be recollected, however, that the lines imitated by Virgil, and the other passages which have been here extracted from the works of Ennius, are very favourable specimens of his taste and genius. Sometimes poems, which have themselves been lost, and of which only fragments are preserved, in the citations of contemporary or succeeding authors, are now believed to have been finer productions than they perhaps actually were. It is the best passages which are quoted, and imitated, and are thus upborne on the tide of ages, while the grosser parts have sunk and perished in the flood. We are in this manner led to form an undue estimate of the excellence of the whole, in the same manner as we doubtless conceive an exaggerated idea of the ancient magnificence of Persepolis or Palmyra, where, while the humble dwellings have mouldered into dust, the temples and pyramids remain, and all that meets the eye is towering and majestic. A few, however, even of the verses of Ennius which have been preserved, are very harsh, and defective in their mechanical construction; others are exceedingly prosaic, as, “Egregie cordatus homo Catus Ælius Sextus;” and not a few are deformed with the most absurd conceits, not so much in the idea, as in a jingle of words and extravagant alliteration. The ambiguity of the celebrated verse, “Aio te Æacida Romanos vincere posse,” may be excused as oracular, but what can be said for such lines as, “Haud doctis dictis certantes sed maledictis. O Tite tute Tate tibi tanta tyranne tulisti. Stultus est qui cupida cupiens cupienter cupit.” This species of conceit was rejected by the good taste of subsequent Latin poets, even in the most degraded periods of literature; and I know no parallel to it, except in some passages of Sidney’s Arcadia. Nothing can be a greater mistake, than to suppose that false taste and jingle are peculiar to the latter ages of poetry, and that the early bards of a country are free from _concetti_. On the whole, the works of Ennius are rather pleasing and interesting, as the early blossoms of that poetry which afterwards opened to such perfection, than estimable from their own intrinsic beauty. To many critics the latter part of Ovid’s observation, “Ennius ingenio maximus—arte rudis,”