though, in its dependence on a verbal point, it may not satisfy the purest taste, is not without a dignity and pathos that are worthy of the large manner of the classical period. Claudian used the heroic hexameter for mythological as well as historical epics. Of his _Gigantomachia_ we possess only an inconsiderable fragment; but the three books of the unfinished _Rape of Proserpine_ are among the finest examples of the purely literary epic. The description of the flowery spring meadows where Proserpine and her companions gather blossoms for garlands is a passage perpetually quoted. It is interesting to note how the rising tide of romanticism has here, as elsewhere, left Claudian wholly untouched. The passage, though elaborately ornate, is executed in the clear hard manner of the Alexandrian school; it has not a trace of that sensitiveness to nature which vibrates in the _Pervigilium Veneris_. We have gone back for a moment to that poetical style which perpetually reminds us of the sculptured friezes of Greek art, severe in outline, immensely adroit and learned in execution, but a little chilly and colourless except in the hands of its greatest masters. After paying to the full the tribute of admiration which is due to Claudian's refined and dignified workmanship, we are still left with the feeling that this kind of poetry was already obsolete. It is not only that, as has been remarked with truth of his historical epics, the elaboration of the treatment is disproportionate to the importance or interest of the subject. _Materiam superabat opus_ might be said with equal truth of much of the work of his predecessors. But a new spirit had by this time penetrated literature, and any poetry wholly divorced from it must be not only artificial--for that alone would prove nothing against it--but unnatural. Claudian is a precursor of the Renaissance in its narrower aspect; the last of the classics, he is at the same time the earliest, and one of the most distinguished, of the classicists. It might seem a mere chance whether his poetry belonged to the fourth or to the sixteenth century.