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his domestic qualities, his plaintive tone, and predisposition to contented enjoyment of rural happiness, Tibullus, under other conditions and another creed, might have found the ideal which he sought; but subjected to the caprices and inconstancy of one mistress after another, his life was alloyed by a series of unprosperous loves. If the third book, as has been stated, is in all probability the work of another hand, the sole attachment that promised a consummation in marriage, that with the compatible but uncertain Neæra, did not come upon the list of his loves. It was Delia, or, as her true name appears to have been, Plania (which the poet altered to affect the Greek), who first seriously engaged Tibullus's affections, and secured the tribute of his most perfect elegies. In condition, she appears to have been, like the Cynthia of Propertius, a hetæra, but of respectable parentage; and in some passages she is spoken of as if a married woman. The poet, at any rate, found a bar to marriage with her of some kind; and probably the inducement of a richer as well as a more permanent