AVIENUS.

The first respectable secular writer in verse is a whole generation later: his name was Rufus Festus Avienus, a descendant of the philosopher Maximus Rufus, who was proconsul twice, in Africa in A.D. 366, and in Greece 371, before he published his works. We learn this from an inscription in verse addressed to Nortia, the goddess of his native Vulsinii, in which he dilates complacently on his offices, his good character, his numerous children, and his numerous poems. In fact, his complacency supported him through the most voluminous undertakings. He translated the "Aratea" for the third time, trying to be more accurate than Cicero or Germanicus, and to introduce a certain element of mystical learning. He paraphrased the "Periegesis," or tour of Dionysius, in 1394 hexameters, and is said to describe with more spirit than his original; he also described the coasts of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Caspian in iambic trimeters, and abridged Livy and the "Æneid" in the same metre. Allowing only a hundred lines to a book, the abridgment of Livy would have been one of the longest poems in the world; it has been happily lost, like the abridgment of Vergil and the greater part of the "Description of the Coast of the Sea." Several minor works of the same author are to be found in anthologies. Neither they nor the hymns and inscriptions of St. Damasus, who was pope from A.D. 366 to 384, need detain us. His longest work consisted of twentysix hexameters on St. Paul, intended as a preface to his epistles.

AUSONIUS.

Decimus Magnus Ausonius is a much more interesting writer. He was the son of a physician settled at Bordeaux: he himself was a tolerable rhetorician, and according to his own account one of the first grammarians of his day, and without a superior in Gaul. This led to his being employed by the elder Valentinian to educate his sons, and, once established in the royal household, his promotion was rapid. He was appointed prætorian prefect for Gaul, Italy, and

Africa, and was made senior consul in 379, which was still an enviable honor. His book of epigrams has three dedications -one to Theodosius the emperor, one to Syagrius, whose descendant was the last representative of Roman authority in Gaul, and one to the younger Drepanius. The epigrams themselves are an imitation of the worst parts of Martial, his servility and obscenity, and of the duller parts of the anthology-inscriptions on statues and the like. One notices that he repeats Martial's unlucky experiment of epigrams in hexameters, and that he is not so impersonal as even Martial. Some half-dozen epigrams are spent in ringing changes on the notion that Sylvius Bonus, a Briton, cannot be both a Briton and good; as much space is spent on nasty imputations against a certain Eunus. The nastiness is gratuitous. Ausonius has a better right than Catullus or Martial to the stock defence of poets, that their life is better than their verses; he appeals to his wife, who ridicules his affectation of naughtiness. His verses to her are really tender and graceful: "Wife, let us live the old life and keep the old names that we took in the bridal bower, and let no day bring with it the change of time, but let me always be your lad and you my lass, though I be further on in years than Nestor, and you run a race with me, and even pass the days of Deiphobe of Cuma: let us never know what is ripe old age: it is well to remember time is a cheat, and ill to count his thefts." The wife to whom this was written died when she was twentyeight. Several epigrams are occupied with enigmatical compliments on her skill in weaving figured stuffs. And Ausonius showed his respect for her memory by remaining single. The same graceful sentimentality, which is new in Latin literature, appears in an epigram to a mistress who had refused him in her prime: "Still give me an embrace, join with me in the joys you did not remember in time, give me leave to enjoy, if not what I desire, what I desired once." There is less novelty in the pretty verses on Bissula, a young German girl whom he received as a slave and brought up as a ward, and in the fluent lines to his pet secretary, who, as we can 1 Aus. "Ep." xix.

easily believe, took down his compositions in shorthand faster than the author, who has no literary vanity, could frame them. The greater part of his writings are simply a grammarian's stock-in-trade, a memoria technica of cities and emperors, and heroes of the Trojan War and wise men of Greece. The so-called play of the Seven Sages, in which each of the seven by turns expounds the maxim which immortalized him, could only pass for a play in a schoolroom. Most of his playful. verse, outside the epigrams, consists of centos and macaronic verse, where the only wit consists in tacking Greek terminations to Latin words, or beginning a verse in one language and ending it in another. Then there are sets of verses that begin and end with monosyllables. The series ends very appropriately with a Grammaticomastix on all the monosyllabic words that a dispute can fairly be raised about.

The commemoration of the different professors at Bordeaux is better; although the writer is complimentary, he is not indiscriminate in his eulogy. One of the most curious points is that several Druids who found their occupation gone took refuge in professorships. Sometimes a professor had ambitions like Ausonius, who affected to believe that for other men the safe rule was to stick to a purely literary career, which he rated so highly that he praised Jucundus for having aspired to it though unqualified. When Ausonius's own promotion came he wished to bequeath his chair to his sister's son, who is commemorated both among the professors and among the members of his family. He seems to have been exceedingly clever, but did not live to sow his wild oats and settle down, as Ausonius says he missed the turning of Pythagoras's letter.

Another quaint figure is Victorius, the deputy of Ausonius, who knew the pedigree of the priests of Cures before Numa, and the legislation of Themis before the days of Jupiter, better than he knew Vergil or Cicero, whom he did not live to study. The family epitaphs have less variety: the most noticeable figures are two aunts who declined on religious grounds to marry, one of whom practised as a doctor. His widowed sister was also a devotee, with skill enough to earn

her living and guard her honor with her spindle, teaching her household the rule of good-living she had learned herself, whose one care it was, and dearer than her life, to know the true God, and love her brothers above all the world. The poet's own attitude to religion is curious: he repeatedly wishes, and quite sincerely, that the manes of his friends may be soothed by his song; sometimes he wonders if they have any sense of what happens after their death; once at least he seems to anticipate a general resurrection and a last judgment, after which men shall share the days of gods; elsewhere, even when he speaks of the manes, he speaks as a monotheist.

At some time in his life, perhaps when he was appointed tutor to the sons of Valentinian, he conformed sincerely and solemnly to the new religion. His idyls are prefaced by a curious comparison between the heavenly Trinity and the earthly trinity of the three emperors, two of whom are partakers of the undivided power of their father. In another rather entertaining poem, on the employments of the day, we have a long prayer in hexameters, of which fifty-seven lines out of eighty-five are taken up with an anxiously orthodox invocation of the Trinity, and a detestation of idolatry and bloody sacrifices (which were forbidden by imperial authority). The prayer itself is like the prayers of Horace and Juvenal.' "Let me desire nothing and fear nothing, let me be content with what is enough; wish nothing base, never have to be ashamed of myself; do to none what in like case I would not were done to me; let no true accusation harm, no doubtful accusation blemish, me. Let me have no power to do evil, but calm ability to do good. Let my dress and diet be plain, let my friends prize me, and let me always bear the name of father, nor be wounded therein. Without pain of body or mind, let all my limbs do their work quietly; let me have all to use, with no pain to maim me; let me have peace and a quiet life, never believe in wonders on earth: when my last hour comes, let a good conscience keep me from fearing or wishing death. When by thy mercy I seem pure from secret faults, let it all be nothing in my eyes, since it should be my 1 Aus. "Eph. or." 59 sqq.

only pleasure to wait for thy judgment; and while the time is prolonged and the day tarries, drive far away the cruel tempter with his flattering snares." The most distinctively Christian part of the prayer is that he looks to be heard in that he fears. He still retains enough of the old leaven to anticipate riding up the Milky Way to heaven. The prayer comes after a sapphic ode calling the page, and a shorter ode in dimeter iambics scolding him for loitering, and telling him to get the chapel open, where, the poet explains, no frankincense or sweet cakes or fire of live turf will be needed. After the prayer he goes out with evident relief to pay visits, and sends his page at ten to bring his friends-five friends, not more— to breakfast, and is left with the cook: the directions unfortunately break off just after the cook has been told to be sure and lick his fingers to find out whether his sauce is savory. The poem concludes with a lengthy description of bad dreams.

The most poetical of his works is a long idyl on the Moselle. There is a great deal of rather clumsy imitation of Vergil's praise of Italy, and a great deal of the matter which we should expect in a guide-book, amplified by being given in verse instead of in prose. For instance, we have a long catalogue of the fish of the Moselle, from perch and tench up to the shad, the river dolphin. Still, there are touches of genuine feeling and insight; the poet is glad to get out of the shadow of the Hochwald into the sunny valley of the Moselle, which reminded him of his own Garonne, as both were clad with vines. He recognized the peculiar character of the scenery of the Moselle, which strikes a modern tourist as a chain of lakes, only its depth and transparency in the enclosed reaches impress him more than the apparent absence of an outlet. His highest expression of admiration is to imagine that, while the rocks and shivering wood and hollow channel ring with the shouts of boatmen and vintagers, the satyrs of the field meet the gray-eyed naiads on the margin, till the tramp of the goat-footed Pan drives the nymphs to shelter under the water. Often, too, Panope rises from the river to trespass among the vineyards in company with the nymphs of the mountain, till the wanton Fauns chase her back. This