have been fashionable in his time. Nothing but the lack of a lofty ideal of life has prevented Catullus from standing at the head of all the Latin poets. As it is, he must be allowed a very high rank, both for the conception and the execution of almost every thing that he has attempted in lyric, iambic, or heroic metre. His Atys is unique, and unsurpassed either in his own language or any other. LIFE OF TIBULLUS. ALBIUS TIBULLUS (his prænomen is unknown), a Roman Knight, inherited an estate at Pedum between Tibur and Praeneste, which was much reduced (see Tib. 1. i. 19, 20) by confiscation during the civil wars, and in all probability the retention of a portion of it was due to the influence and exertions of his friend and patron M. Valerius Messala. The date of his birth is unknown; but he died young, and not long after Virgil, the date of whose death was B.C. 19. The deaths of the two poets were commemorated in a beautiful epigram by Domitius Marsus, which is generally printed with the works of Tibullus. It runs,— "Te quoque Virgilii comitem non aequa, Tibulle, Ne foret, aut elegis molles qui fleret amores, The extraordinary aversion to war expressed by Tibullus may have been natural, or may have been assumed as an excuse for not bearing arms on the side of Augustus, whom he never condescended to flatter, although Messala was one of Augustus's firmest supporters. Still, after the battle of Actium (B.C. 31), he followed Messala into Aquitania, and was present at the great victory of the Atax (Aude), which put an end to the insurrection. In B.C. 30 he set out with Messala for the East, but was taken ill and obliged to remain behind in Corcyra (Tib. i. 3). His first lady-love was DELIA, a word which has been conjectured to represent the Latin PLANIA in signification as well as number of syllables and quantity. A doubtful reading in Apuleius (Apol. 106) gives the name Plaucia or Plautia. The second book is devoted to a second lady named NEMESIS, and Horace (1 Od. xxxiii.) condoles with him on the cruelty of a certain GLYCERA, who appears more likely to have been identical with Nemesis than an altogether different flame. 6 Only the first two books current under the name of Tibullus are authentic. The third professes to be written by a poet of the name of LYGDAMUS, and is most properly quoted under the title of 'Pseudo-Tibullus.' This poet was born B.C. 43, the year of the siege of Mutina, Quum cecidit fato consul uterque pari.' His style resembles that of Propertius rather than that of Tibullus, and his sentiments are gentle and pure. The hexameter poem at the commencement of the fourth book is miserable, and cannot be ascribed to Tibullus, but some of the smaller Elegies are worthy of our poet, whose style they closely resemble. LIFE OF PROPERTIUS. SEXTUS AURELIUS PROPERTIUS was a native of Umbria on the borders of Etruria, and the honour of his birth appears to lie between the towns of Hispellum and Asisium, of which the latter must have the preference, if Lachmann's conjecture of Asisi for Asis in Prop. v. 1. 125 be admitted. Clinton places the date of his birth in B.C. 51, which would make him eight years the senior of Ovid, and yet allow them to call themselves sodales. Propertius appears to have been intended for an advocate, but, like Ovid, to have relinquished his profession for the practice of poetry. He was deprived of a portion of his patrimony by one of the distributions of land among the veteran soldiers, but soon attracted the notice of Maecenas by his poetical talents. His principal mistress was CYNTHIA, a native of Tibur, whose real name is said to have been HOSTIA, his entanglement with whom appears to have wasted a great portion of his life. The ambition of Propertius was to riva? the later Greek Elegiac poets, and this causes many of his poems to be less attractive to modern minds than the simplicity of Tibullus. It is singular that he never mentions Horace or Tibullus, although he expresses the highest opinion of Virgil. Quintilian (x. 1. 93) says that the opinion of his day divided the palm of Elegiac poetry between Propertius and Tibullus, but that he himself preferred Tibullus. The last Elegy of the last book of Propertius is one of the most beautiful poems of antiquity. The date of his death is unknown; but he appears to have married after the death of Cynthia and left a family, a descendant of which, Passienus Paulus, a man of equestrian rank, is mentioned by Pliny the Younger (Ep. vi. 15) as a writer of elegies. ON THE METRES EMPLOYED BY CATULLUS. I.—THE GALLIAMBIC METRE, OR METRE OF THE ATTIS OF CATULLUS. THIS has long been known in Germany, although not generally recognized in this country, to be an adaptation of the IONIC A MINORE TETRAMETER CATALECTIC. It consists of two Ionic a minore dimeters, the second of which is catalectic, thus closely resembling the Priapean metre, the last or Pherecratean half of which is identical with the first or Glyconic half, with the exception of being one syllable shorter. The normal scheme of the metre is this (the last syllable being common, according to the usual rule) :— No complete pure Ionic a minore line occurs in the Attis, but we obtain one by piecing together the first half of line 54 and the last half of line 60. Et ĕar' ōm/ni' ǎdīrēm || stădĭ' ēt gÿm năsĭīs. The first thing to notice now is, that the Ionic a majore (——~~) is admissible in the first place of each hemistich. Hence we obtain : An instance of this we find in line 22, Tibicěn ubi cănīt Phryx || curvō grăvě | călămō, which is a pure Ionic, though not a pure Ionic a minore verse. Secondly, we must remark the free use of resolved syllables, two short representing one long one, as in line 4, which in other respects is a pure Ionic line. Stimŭlātus ibi fŭrēnti || răbĭē văgus | ănĭmīs. We thus obtain the following scheme : But we come now to the grand crux, which, added to the foregoing variations, has rendered the metre so difficult to explain, that most British metrists have given it up in despair. Between the 1st and 2nd and the 3rd and 4th Ionic feet there is much more frequently than otherwise an ANACLASIS or fracture, i. e. the last syllable of the one foot is run into the first syllable of the other, which is the great thing that gives the metre its peculiar and charming cadence. If we represent this by means of a fraction, taking one half of a long syllable with the first, and the second half with the second foot of a hemistich, we shall arrive at a clear representation and understanding of the case. Let us take line 1, in the first half of which this anaclasis occurs at the end of an Ionic a minore. Supĕr altă věct | věctus "Attīs || cělěrī rătě | măria. 2 2 And line 91, where it occurs in the last half of the verse. Děǎ māgnă dělă Cỹbēbē || děă dămînă Din | Dĭndymei. |