These verses cannot be struck out. The fourth book is just as little Tibullus’ own: the panegyric on Messalla is the production of some poor fellow who was in want of a patron, and certainly not that of a knight. Both books, the third and the fourth, are by authors who are inferior to Tibullus. The smaller poems which bear the names of Sulpicia and Cerinthus, may be Tibullus’ own; but they are almost too good to be his: there is too much strength and boldness in them. To me, Tibullus is an unpleasing poet: this womanish and maudlin grief, this unantique sentimentality, are mistaken tones of Mimnermus, which to me are unbearable; and above all, in a Roman. Somewhat older perhaps than Horace was Cornelius Gallus, a man of rank who had also tried his fortune in war, and whom Augustus had appointed governor of Egypt, in which post indeed he behaved shamefully. He must, however, have had his amiable qualities, as Virgil was so fond of him, and introduced his praise in the fourth book of the Georgics: it was to replace it, that the poet had afterwards to put in the episode of Aristæus. Having been convicted of very disgraceful things, Gallus put an end to his own life. He had translated Euphorion, and written elegies, of which, however, one line only remains. He must have been a distinguished poet, though what goes under his name, all but a few fragments, is not genuine. If he is called _durior_, this perhaps implies that he had the old language and versification of Catullus and Lucretius, which Quinctilian might indeed have found harsh. One who also lived at the same time as these men, was Varius. Of him we have unfortunately but a few verses; the ancients, however, ranked him with Virgil and Horace among the great poets of that age; he was especially renowned for his tragedy of Thyestes. This is a very unhappy subject; and I am afraid that there was a good deal of rant in that piece, and that it stood in the same relation to Greek tragedy as the Æneid to the Iliad. The tragic poets of that age in all likelihood no longer had before them the old Athenian tragedy, like Pacuvius and Attius, but the Alexandrian; for what was called the Pleias, was certainly something quite different from the old tragic poets. One may get an idea of it from Seneca, whose pieces are certainly not of Roman home-growth, but evidently formed after foreign models: his lyrical part is limited to anapæsts, and very rarely contains quite simple strophes of four lines. If I had the choice, I would rather have Varius’ poem _De Morte_ than his tragedy.