I must observe here, by way of caution, that the authors of fictitious inscriptions have been nowhere more active than in producing _sentimental_ inscriptions. That on Julia Alpinula was received as genuine by Johannes Müller, the historian of Switzerland and pronounced by Lord Byron to be the most pathetic of human compositions. JULIA ALPINULA HIC JACEO. INFELICIS PATRIS INFELIX PROLES DEÆ AVENTICÆ SACERDOS. EXORARE PATRIS NECEM NON POTUI. MALE MORI IN FATIS ILLI ERAT. VIXI ANN. XXIII. The hint was taken from Tacitus (Hist. 1, 68), where Cæcina is said to have put Julius Alpinus, the chief man of Aventicum, to death. It was sent by Paulus Gulielmus, a notorious literary impostor, to Lipsius, but the original has never been seen, and it is now universally admitted to be a forgery. Not a few of the poetical inscriptions in Burmann's "Anthologia" are of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was certainly, however, by no fraud of the author that the beautiful lines in Jortin's "Lusus Poetici" beginning,-- Quæ te tam tenera rapuerunt Poeta juventa, have been received into collections as ancient. Among the sepulcral inscriptions arising out of the relations of life, those of husbands and wives are naturally the most common. The celebrated speech of Metellus Numidicus the Censor, when exhorting the Romans to marriage, does not indicate a high appreciation of the female sex. "If," said he, "O Quirites, we could do without wives, we should all like to be free from the annoyance; but since nature has so arranged things that we can neither live comfortably with them nor at all without them, we should put up with a temporary inconvenience for the sake of a permanent benefit." Gellius, who reports the speech, naturally remarks that this was no very powerful recommendation of matrimony, and that he should rather have said that in general marriage had no troubles; that if they sometimes seem to occur, they were few and light and easy to be borne, and were thrown into the shade by greater pleasures and advantages; and that the troubles which did arise did not happen to all, nor by the fault of nature, but from the fault and injustice of husbands. Castricius, on the other hand, vindicated Metellus, and maintained that as Censor he was bound to tell the whole truth, known to himself and admitted by every one else.[91] On such a subject it is not fair to take the evidence of books, in which, in ancient times at least, only one side is heard; or of satirists, who are, one and all, caricaturists, and very generally ill-tempered men; or of poets, whose own lives were flagrantly licentious; nor to draw conclusions respecting the character of Roman women generally from a few notorious examples of vice in elevated stations. I believe that we may obtain a truer as well as a more favourable conception of the conjugal relation in the imperial times, from the sepulcral inscriptions. They proceed from the middle classes, who give its moral character to a