show that where he was interested neither his eye nor his language had
any weakness; but, as a rule, he is not interested either in nature or,
if the truth be told, in Cynthia, but wholly in himself. He ranks among
the most learned of the Augustan poets; but, for want of the rigorous
training and self-criticism in which Virgil and Horace spent their lives,
he made on the whole but a weak and ineffective use of a natural gift
perhaps equal to either of theirs. Thus it is that his earliest work is
at the same time his most fascinating and brilliant. After the _Cynthia_
he rapidly became, in the mordant phrase used by Heine of Musset, _un
jeune homme d'un bien beau passe_. Some premonition of early death seems
to have haunted him; and the want of self-control in his poetry may
reflect actual physical weakness united with his vivid imagination.

The second and third books of the _Elegies_,[9] though they show some
technical advance, and are without the puerilities which here and there
occur in the _Cynthia,_ are on the whole immensely inferior to it in
interest and charm. There is still an occasional line of splendid beauty,
like the wonderful--

_Sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum;_

an occasional passage of stately rhythm, like the lines beginning--

_Quandocunque igitur nostros mors clausit ocellos;_

but the smooth versification has now few surprises; the learning is
becoming more mechanical; there is a tendency to say over again what he
had said before, and not to say it quite so well.