public spirit; but Christian charity and chivalrous generosity were alike unknown to them.

It would have been obviously improper to mimic the manner of any particular age or country. Something has been borrowed, however, from our own old ballads, and more from Sir Walter Scott, the great restorer of our balladpoetry. To the Iliad still greater obligations are due; and those obligations have been contracted with the less hesitation because there is reason to believe that some of the old Latin minstrels really had recourse to that inexhaustible store of poetical images.

It would have been easy to swell this little volume to a very considerable bulk, by appending notes filled with quotations; but to a learned reader such notes are not necessary; for an unlearned reader they would have little interest; and the judgment passed both by the learned and by the unlearned on a work of the imagination will always depend much more on the general character and spirit of such a work than on minute details.

HORATIUS.

THERE can be little doubt that among those parts of early Roman history which had a poetical origin was the legend of Horatius Cocles. We have several versions of the story, and these versions differ from each other in points of no small importance. Polybius, there is reason to believe, heard the tale recited over the remains of some Consul or Prætor descended from the old Horatian patricians; for he evidently introduces it as a specimen of the narratives with which the Romans were in the habit of embellishing their funeral oratory. It is remarkable that, according to his description, Horatius defended the bridge alone, and perished in the waters. According to the chronicles which Livy and Dionysius followed, Horatius had two companions, swam safe to shore, and was loaded with honors and rewards.

These discrepancies are easily explained. Our own literature, indeed, will furnish an exact parallel to what may have taken place at Rome. It is highly probable that the memory of the war of Porsena was preserved by compo sitions much resembling the two ballads which stand first in the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. In both those ballads the English commanded by the Percy fight with the Scots, commanded by the Douglas. In one of the ballads, the Douglas is killed by a nameless English archer, and the Percy by a Scottish spearman: in the other, the Percy slays the Douglas in single combat, and is himself made prisoner. In the former, Sir Hugh Montgomery is shot through the heart by a Northumbrian bowman: in the latter, he is taken, and exchanged for the Percy. Yet both the ballads relate to the same event, and that an event which probably took place within the memory of persons who

were alive when both the ballads were made. One of the

minstrels says:

"Old men that knowen the grownde well yenoughe

Call it the battell of Otterburn:

At Otterburn began this spurne

Upon a monnyn day.

Ther was the dougghte Doglas slean :

The Perse never went away."

The other poet sums up the event in the following lines:

"Thys fraye bygan at Otterborne

Bytwene the nyghte and the day;
Ther the Dowglas lost hys lyfe,

And the Percy was lede away."

It is by no means unlikely that there were two old Roman lays about the defence of the bridge; and that, while the story which Livy has transmitted to us was preferred by the multitude, the other, which ascribed the whole glory to Horatius alone, may have been the favorite with the Horatian house.

The following ballad is supposed to have been made about a hundred and twenty years after the war which it celebrates, and just before the taking of Rome by the Gauls. The author seems to have been an honest citizen, proud of the military glory of his country, sick of the disputes of factions, and much given to pining after good old times which had never really existed. The allusion, however, to the partial manner in which the public lands were allotted could proceed only from a plebeian; and the allusion to the fraudulent sale of spoils marks the date of the poem, and shows that the poet shared in the general discontent with which the proceedings of Camillus, after the taking of Veii, were regarded.

The penultimate syllable of the name Porsena, has been shortened in spite of the authority of Niebuhr, who pronounces, without assigning any ground for his opinion, that Martial was guilty of a decided blunder in the line,

"Hanc spectare manum Porsena non potuit.”

It is not easy to understand how any modern scholar, whatever his attainments may be,-and those of Niebuhr were undoubtedly immense,-can venture to pronounce that Martial did not know the quantity of a word which he must have uttered and heard uttered a hundred times before he left school. Niebuhr seems also to have forgotten that

Martial has fellow culprits to keep him in countenance. Horace has committed the same decided blunder; for he gives us, as a pure iambic line,

"Minacis aut Etrusca Porsenæ manus."

Silius Italicus has repeatedly offended in the same way, as when he says,

and again,

"Cernitur effugiens ardentem Porsena dextram;"

"Clusinum vulgus, cum, Porsena magne, jubebas." A modern writer may be content to err in such company. Niebuhr's supposition that each of the three defenders of the bridge was the representative of one of the three patrician tribes is both ingenious and probable, and has been adopted in the following poem.

HORATIUS.

A LAY MADE ABOUT THE YEAR OF THE CITY CCCLX.

1.

LARS PORSENA of Clusium
By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.
By the Nine Gods he swore it,
And named a trysting day,
And made his messengers ride forth,
East and west and south and north,
To summon his array.

2.

East and west and south and north

The messengers ride fast,
And tower and town and cottage
Have heard the trumpet's blast.

Shame on the false Etruscan
Who lingers in his home,
When Porsena of Clusium

Is on the march for Rome.

3.

The horsemen and the footmen
Are pouring in amain

From many a stately market-place;
From many a fruitful plain;
From many a lonely hamlet,

Which, hid by beach and pine,

Like an eagle's nest hangs on the crest Of purple Apennine;

4.

From lordly Volaterræ,

Where scowls the far-famed hold

Piled by the hands of giants

For god-like kings of old;

From seagirt Populonia,

Whose sentinels descry

Sardinia's snowy mountain-tops
Fringing the southern sky;

5.

From the proud mart of Pisa,
Queen of the western waves,
Where ride Massilia's triremes

Heavy with fair-haired slaves;

From where sweet Clanis wanders

Through corn, and vines, and flowers; From where Cortona lifts to heaven Her diadem of towers.

6.

Tall are the oaks whose acorns
Drop in dark Auser's rill;

Fat are the stags that champ the boughs
Of the Ciminian hill ;

Beyond all streams Clitumnus

Is to the herdsman dear;

Best of all pools the fowler loves

The great Volsinian mere.

7.

But now no stroke of woodman

Is heard by Auser's rill;

No hunter tracks the stag's green path Up the Ciminian hill;

Unwatched along Clitumnus

Grazes the milk-white steer;

Unharmed the water-fowl may dip

In the Volsinian mere.