contained the regal period; the fourth began the history of the Republic and carried it down to the burning of the city by the Gauls; the fifth comprised the Samnite wars; the sixth, that with Pyrrhus; the seventh, the first Punic war; the eighth and ninth, the war with Hannibal; the tenth and eleventh, that with Macedonia; the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth, that with Syria; the fifteenth, the campaign of Fulvius Nobilior in Aetolia, and ended apparently with the death of the great Scipio. The work then received a new preface, and continued the history down to the poet's last years, containing many personal notices, until it was finally brought to a close in 172 B.C. after having occupied its author eighteen years. [1] "The interest of this last book," says Conington, [2] "must have centred, at least to us, in the discourse about himself, in which the old bard seems to have indulged in closing this his greatest poem. Even now we may read with sympathy his boastful allusion to his late enrolment among the citizens of the conquering city; we may be touched by the mention he appears to have made of the year of his age in which he wrote, bordering closely on the appointed term of man's life; and we may applaud as the curtain falls on his grand comparison of himself to a victorious racer laden with Olympian honours, and now at last consigned to repose:-- 'Sicut fortis equus, spatio qui saepe supremo Vicit Olimpia, nunc senio confectus quiescit.'" He was thus nearly fifty when he began to write, a fact which strikes us as remarkable. We are accustomed to associate the poetic gift with a highly-strung nervous system, and unusual bodily conditions not favourable to long life, as well as with a precocious special development which proclaims unmistakably in the boy the future greatness of the man. None of these conditions seem to have been present in the early Roman school. Livius was a quiet schoolmaster, Naevius a vigorous soldier, Ennius a self-indulgent but hard-working _litterateur_, Plautus an active man, whose animal spirits not even the flour-mill could quench, Pacuvius a steady but genial student, Accius and Terence finished men of the world; and all, except Terence (and he probably met his early death through an accident), enjoyed the full term of man's existence. Moreover, few of them began life by being poets, and some, as Ennius and Plautus, did not apply themselves to poetry until they had reached mature years. With these facts the character of their genius as a rule agrees. We should not expect in such men the fine inspiration of a Sophocles, a Goethe, or a Shelley, and we do not find it. The poetic frenzy, so magnificently described in the _Phaedrus_ of Plato, which caused the Greeks to regard the poet in his moments of creation as actually possessed by the god, is nowhere manifest among the early Romans; and if it claims to appear in their later literature, we find it after all a spurious substitute, differing widely