which, though Propertius has not the story-telling gift of Ovid, showed
the way to the delightful narratives of the _Fasti_. A few of the more
personal elegies have a new and not very agreeable kind of realism, as
though Musset had been touched with the spirit of Flaubert. In one, the
ninth of the fourth book, the realism is in a different and pleasanter
vein; only Herrick among English poets has given such imaginative charm
to straightforward descriptions of the ordinary private life of the
middle classes. The fifth book ends with the noble elegy on Cornelia, the
wife of Paulus Aemilius Lepidus, in which all that is best in Propertius'
nature at last finds splendid and memorable expression. It has some of
his common failings,--passages of inappropriate learning, and a little
falling off towards the end. But where it rises to its height, in the
lines familiar to all who know Latin, it is unsurpassed in any poetry for
grace and tenderness.

_Nunc tibi commendo communia pignora natos;
Haec cura et cineri spirat inusta meo.
Fungere maternis vicibus pater: illa meorum
Omnis erit collo turba fovenda tuo.
Oscula cum dederis tua flentibus, adice matris;
Tota domus coepit nunc onus esse tuum.
Et siquid doliturus eris, sine testibus illis!
Cum venient, siccis oscula falle genis:
Sat tibi sint noctes quas de me, Paule, fatiges,
Somniaque in faciem reddita saepe meam._

In these lines, hardly to be read without tears, Propertius for once
rises into that clear air in which art passes beyond the reach of
criticism. What he might have done in this new manner had he lived longer
can only be conjectured; at the same age neither Virgil nor Horace had