In the fourth and fifth books of the _Elegies_ there is a wide range of subject; the verse is being tested for various purposes, and its flexibility answers to almost every demand. But already we feel its fatal facility. The passage beginning _Atque ubi iam Venerem,_ in the poem where he contrasts his own life with those of the followers of riches and ambition, is a dilution into twelve couplets of eight noble lines of the _Georgics,_ with an effect almost as feeble, if not so grotesque, as that of the later metaphrasts, who occupied themselves in turning heroic into elegiac poems by inserting a pentameter between each two lines. The sixth elegy of the same book is nothing but a cento of translations from the _Anthology,_ strung together and fastened up at the end by an original couplet in the worst and most puerile manner of his early writing. On the other hand, these books include fresh work of great merit, and some of great beauty. The use of the elegiac metre to tell stories from Graeco- Roman mythology and legendary Roman history is begun in several poems which, though Propertius has not the story-telling gift of Ovid, showed the way to the delightful narratives of the _Fasti_. A few of the more personal elegies have a new and not very agreeable kind of realism, as though Musset had been touched with the spirit of Flaubert. In one, the ninth of the fourth book, the realism is in a different and pleasanter vein; only Herrick among English poets has given such imaginative charm to straightforward descriptions of the ordinary private life of the middle classes. The fifth book ends with the noble elegy on Cornelia, the wife of Paulus Aemilius Lepidus, in which all that is best in Propertius' nature at last finds splendid and memorable expression. It has some of his common failings,--passages of inappropriate learning, and a little falling off towards the end. But where it rises to its height, in the lines familiar to all who know Latin, it is unsurpassed in any poetry for grace and tenderness. _Nunc tibi commendo communia pignora natos; Haec cura et cineri spirat inusta meo. Fungere maternis vicibus pater: illa meorum Omnis erit collo turba fovenda tuo. Oscula cum dederis tua flentibus, adice matris; Tota domus coepit nunc onus esse tuum. Et siquid doliturus eris, sine testibus illis! Cum venient, siccis oscula falle genis: Sat tibi sint noctes quas de me, Paule, fatiges, Somniaque in faciem reddita saepe meam._