and whom he addresses with a pathos that is quite sincere. As hope of
recall grew fainter, his work failed more and more; the incorrect
language and slovenly versification of some of the _Letters from Pontus_
are in sad contrast to the Ovid of ten years before, and if he went on
writing till the end, it was only because writing had long been a second
nature to him.

Of the extraordinary force and fineness of Ovid's natural genius, there
never have been two opinions; had he but been capable of controlling it,
instead of indulging it, he might have, in Quintilian's opinion, been
second to no Roman poet. In his _Medea_, the critic adds, he did show
some of this self-control; its loss is the more to be lamented. But the
easy good-nature of his own disposition, no less than the whole impulse
of the literary fashion then prevalent, was fatal to the continuous
exercise of such severe self-education: and the man who was so keen and
shrewd in his appreciation of the follies of lovers had all the weakness
of a lover for the faults of his own poetry. The delightful story of the
three lines which his critical friends urged him to erase proves, if
proof were needed, that this weakness was not blindness, and that he was
perfectly aware of the vices of his own work. The child of his time, he
threw all his brilliant gifts unhesitatingly into the scale of new ideas
and new fashions; his "modernity," to use a current term of the present
day, is greater than that of any other ancient author of anything like
his eminence.

_Prisca iuvent alios, ego me nunc denique natum
Gratulor: haec aetas moribus apta meis--_

this is his deliberate attitude throughout his life.