Yet there is excuse for this in the age in which he lived; in better times, it would not have been thus. One sees in him a mild and quiet man, who in truth was always constrained and reserved; the wild, reckless Catullus, with his loud laugh, and his loud wailings, comes more home to our hearts: the same tone which there is in Horace may also have been that of Menander, and the latest Athenian comedy. Horace did not choose to let his heart bleed, and thus he puts us indeed into a sadder frame of mind. When a real good is lost for the people, one should not deaden the feelings to it, and try to make the world thoughtless; but one should carry the grief for it within one’s breast, and let it have free course, yet without cherishing or artificially fostering it. “He who has lost a real good,” says Friederick Leopold Von Stolberg, “has often much left to him, if he retains the consciousness of what he has lost.” Horace with all this is still ever noble and amiable: he has only misunderstood an unhappy age. He lived nearly to his fifty-seventh year. Of the same standing as Horace was Tibullus an _Eques Romanus_: he was one of those whose fortune had somewhat suffered in those stormy times. The year of his birth is unknown to us: from an epigram which is ascribed to Domitius Marsus (_Te quoque Virgilio comitem non æqua, Tibulle_, &c.), we merely gather that he died soon after Virgil. Yet there is some doubt about that epigram: the way in which Horace addresses Tibullus, seems to bespeak a contemporary. Of Tibullus, the first two books are not to be doubted; but the third cannot possibly be his, although the name of the author can hardly be Lygdamus: for it may only be substituted for the right one, as being of the same quantity. Thus it is also with the names of women: that of the mistress of Propertius, whom he calls Cynthia, was Hostia; that of Tibullus’ Delia, was Plania. Owing to party spirit, people will not admit the truth of Voss’s remark, that in the third book there is quite a different metrical character, and also quite another turn of expression: he who does not see this, is in my opinion no judge of questions either of grammar or of metre. A distich has been rejected as spurious because it clashes with the chronology of Tibullus: the poet of the third book was born, like Ovid, in 709, under the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa, as he says himself:— Natalem primo nostrum videre parentes, Cum cecidit fato consul uterque pari.