This was the noble group of the poets of that age, such as seldom have met together in this world. These poets Augustus found living when he made himself master of the state; they have passed the shortest part of their lives under his rule. But now a second generation arose, which is really to be called the Augustan. It begins with Propertius, whose poems are evidently imitations from the Alexandrian school; whereas Horace kept to the older lyric style, although Virgil already begins to follow somewhat in the track of the poets of Alexandria and Pergamus. Propertius must have been born about 700. He was a native of Umbria, and his youth was about the time of the assignments of land: it was his ambition to be the Roman Callimachus or Philetas. Much greater than he,—in fact, of all the Roman poets whose works have come down to us, by far the most poetical after Catullus,—was Ovid, born in 709. Virgil is evidently disheartened by his lot; Horace’s mind was painfully distracted in another way, as he fondly loved Brutus; Tibullus, with his feeling heart, was weighed down by evil times; Propertius was so affected by the early loss of his property, that free enjoyment of life and perfect ease never returned to him: but as for Catullus, on the other hand, the unbounded freedom of his humour sprang from the independence of his fortune. His father must have been one of the most eminent men in his province; he was a guest-friend of Cæsar. Ovid was born with one of the most happy dispositions that heaven can give, at a time when the troubles of the Perusian war could only reach him in his cradle; he was in his thirteenth year when Cæsar Octavianus conquered at Actium: thus his lightheartedness and cheerfulness arose from the circumstances of the age in which he lived. On this we are all of us dependent: my own tone of mind is quite different from what it would have been had I been born thirty years sooner or later. Ovid was a young man of rank and wealth at Sulmo, who began the world adorned with every gift of mind and body: a greater facility no man could have, and in this respect, he is among the very first poets. In Schiller’s poems, one may every where remark his struggle with the forms of verse, and the toil with which he worked; whilst in Goethe’s early productions, everything is as if written off-hand. The Greek lyric poets also are never far-fetched; it is as if they could express themselves only in the way in which they did, and in none other: Horace, unlike them, is plodding, and it is but seldom that anything, as it were, bubbles out of him. In Ovid, all comes fresh from the heart: his faults, which also run through his poetry, are well known. The cause of his misfortune is a riddle which no human sagacity will ever be able to make out; and the endless stories which have been spread about it are but so many absurdities. The utter depression of his mind during his abode in Tomi