richness of expression which a long line of poets hands on to their successors. While professing to imitate the structure of the Homeric verse, he was unable to seize its finer cadences. Nor had he learned the stricter conditions under which that metre could be adapted to the powerful and weighty movement of the Latin language. If he did much to establish Latin prosody on principles deviating considerably from those observed by the contemporary comic poets, yet many points which were regulated unalterably for Virgil were left quite unsettled by Ennius. There are found occasionally in these fragments lines without any _caesura_ before the fifth foot, as the following, in one of the longest and least imperfect of his remains-- Corde capessere: semita nulla pedem stabilibat. and this in a passage in which the sound seems intended to imitate the sense-- Poste recumbite vestraque pectora pellite tonsis. And though such marked violations of harmony are rare, yet there is a large proportion of lines in which the laws for the caesura observed by later poets are violated. Again, while the final 's' is in most cases not sounded before a word beginning with a consonant (a usage which finally disappears only in the Augustan poets) the final m, on the other hand, is sometimes left without elision before a vowel, as in the following line-- Miscent inter sese inimicitiam agitantes. The quantity of syllables and the inflexions of words were so far unsettled, that such lines as the following are read, Partem fuisset de summis rebu' regendis; and this, Noenum rumores ponebat ante salutem; and Volturus in spinis miserum mandebat homonem. Among the ruder characteristics of his diction, his use of prosaic and technical terms is especially to be noticed. The following lines, for instance, read more like the bare statement of a chronicle, or of a legal document, than an extract from a poetical narrative:-- Cives Romani tunc facti sunt Campani; and this Appius indixit Karthaginiensibu' bellum; and these lines enumerating the various priesthoods established by Numa,-- Volturnalem Palatualem Furrinalem Floralemque Falacrem et Pomonalem fecit Hic idem. Yet, in spite of these imperfections, both his rhythm and language produce the impression of power and originality. With all the roughness and irregularity of his measure, and notwithstanding the inharmonious structure of continuous passages, his lines often have a weighty and impressive effect, like that produced by some of the great passages in Lucretius and Virgil. It is said of the rhetorician Aelian that he excessively admired in Ennius both 'the greatness of his mind and the grandeur of his metre[95].' Something of this sonorous grandeur may be recognised in a fragment descriptive of the havoc made by woodcutters in a great forest,--a passage in which the language of Ennius again appears as a connecting link between that of Homer and of Virgil:--