he allows himself any approach to tenderness. The _Ars Amatoria,_ full as
it is of a not unkindly humour, of worldly wisdom and fine insight, is
perhaps the most immoral poem ever written. The most immoral, not the
most demoralizing: he wrote for an audience for whom morality, apart from
the code of good manners which society required, did not exist; and
wholly free as it is from morbid sentiment, the one great demoralizing
influence over men and women, it may be doubted whether the poem is one
which ever did any reader serious harm, while few works are more
intellectually stimulating within a certain limited range. To readers for
whom its qualities have exhausted or have not acquired their stimulating
force, it merely is tiresome; and this, indeed, is the fate which in the
present age, when wit is not in vogue, has very largely overtaken it.

Interspersed in the _Art of Love_ are a number of stories from the old
mythology, introduced to illustrate the argument, but set out at greater
length than was necessary for that purpose, from the active pleasure it
always gives Ovid to tell a story. When he conceived the plan of his
_Metamorphoses,_ he had recognised this narrative instinct as his special
gift. His tragedy of _Medea_ had remained a single effort in dramatic
form, unless the _Heroides_ can be classed as dramatic monologues. The
_Medea,_ but for two fine single lines, is lost; but all the evidence is
clear that Ovid had no natural turn for dramatic writing, and that it was
merely a clever _tour de force_. In the idea of the _Metamorphoses_ he
found a subject, already treated in more than one Alexandrian poem, that
gave full scope for his narrative gift and his fertile ingenuity. The
result was a poem as long, and almost as unflagging, as the _Odyssey_. A
vast mass of multifarious stories, whose only connection is the casual
fact of their involving or alluding to some transformation of human
beings into stones, trees, plants, beasts, birds, and the like, is cast
into a continuous narrative. The adroitness with which this is done makes