The passion of love was a favourite theme both of the early lyrical poets of Greece, and of the courtly writers of Alexandria; but the works of the former have reached us only in inconsiderable fragments; and the latter, with the exception of Theocritus, are much inferior to the Roman poets who made them their models. It is in Latin literature that we are brought most near to the power of this passion in the ancient world. Few among the poets who have recorded their own experience of love, in any age, have expressed a feeling so true or so intense as Catullus. He has all the ardent, self-forgetful devotion, if he wants the chivalry and purity, of modern sentiment. He has painted the love of others, also, with graceful fidelity. He has shown the finest sense in discerning, and the finest power in delineating the charm of youthful passion, when first awakening into life, or first unfolding into true affection. It is by his delineation of the agony of Dido that Virgil has imparted the chief personal interest to the story of the Aeneid. If he has failed to embody any complex type of character, he has described the agitation and pathos of this particular passion at least with a powerful hand. Horace is the poet of the lighter and gayer moods of love. Without ever becoming a slave to it he experienced enough of its pains and pleasures, to enable him to paint the fascination or the waywardness of a mistress with the equable feeling of an epicurean, but, at the same time, with the refined observation of a poet. The elegiac poets of the Augustan age, making pleasure the chief pursuit of their lives, have made the more ignoble and transient phases of this passion the predominant motive of their poetry. Yet the effeminacy of Tibullus is redeemed by real tenderness of heart; there is ardent emotion expressed by Propertius for his living mistress, and true affection in the lines in which he recalls her memory after death; the profligacy of Ovid is, if not redeemed, at least relieved, by his buoyant wit and his brilliant fancy. Roman poetry is also interesting as the revelation of personal experience and character. The biographies of ancient authors are, for the most part, meagre and untrustworthy; and thus it is chiefly through the conscious or unconscious self-portraiture in their writings that the actual men of antiquity are brought into close contact with the modern world. Few men of any age or country are so well known to us as Horace; and it is from his own writings, exclusively, that this intimate knowledge has been obtained. The lines in which he describes Lucilius are more applicable to himself than to any extant writer of Greece or Rome,-- Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim Credebat libris: neque si male cesserat, unquam Decurrens alio, neque si bene: quo fit, ut omnis Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella Vita senis[6].