show that where he was interested neither his eye nor his language had any weakness; but, as a rule, he is not interested either in nature or, if the truth be told, in Cynthia, but wholly in himself. He ranks among the most learned of the Augustan poets; but, for want of the rigorous training and self-criticism in which Virgil and Horace spent their lives, he made on the whole but a weak and ineffective use of a natural gift perhaps equal to either of theirs. Thus it is that his earliest work is at the same time his most fascinating and brilliant. After the _Cynthia_ he rapidly became, in the mordant phrase used by Heine of Musset, _un jeune homme d'un bien beau passé_. Some premonition of early death seems to have haunted him; and the want of self-control in his poetry may reflect actual physical weakness united with his vivid imagination. The second and third books of the _Elegies_,[9] though they show some technical advance, and are without the puerilities which here and there occur in the _Cynthia,_ are on the whole immensely inferior to it in interest and charm. There is still an occasional line of splendid beauty, like the wonderful-- _Sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum;_ an occasional passage of stately rhythm, like the lines beginning-- _Quandocunque igitur nostros mors clausit ocellos;_ but the smooth versification has now few surprises; the learning is becoming more mechanical; there is a tendency to say over again what he had said before, and not to say it quite so well. Through these two books Cynthia is still the main subject. But with the advance of years, and his own growing fame as a poet, his passion--if that can be called a passion which was so self-conscious and so sentimental--fell away from him, and left his desire for literary reputation the really controlling motive of his work. In the introductory poem to the fourth book there is a new and almost aggressive tone with regard to his own position among the Roman poets, which is in strong contrast to the modesty of the epilogue to the third book. The inflated invocation of the ghost of Callimachus laid him fatally open to the quietly disdainful reference by which, without even mentioning Propertius by name, Horace met it a year or two later in the second book of the _Epistles_. But even Horace is not infallible; and Propertius was, at all events, justified in regarding himself as the head of a new school of poetry, and one which struck its roots wide and deep.