Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/132

120 blame on a false and odious go-between, who pleads her mistress's illness or absence from home, when her voice gives the lie to the excuse. It is characteristic of Tibullus that he finds it almost impossible to think any evil of his unscrupulous enslavers, and always creates a deputy, in the person of whom they receive his reproaches and curses. In the year 18, it would appear, Tibullus succumbed to repeated inroads on a health always delicate, and died, as we learn from Ovid, with his hand clasped in that of Nemesis. The picture of his obsequies drawn by the author of the 'Amores' may be in part a fancy sketch, where, for example, it represents Delia and Nemesis embracing at the funeral pyre, and the newer love waving the earlier off with assurances that—

whilst Delia faltered out that, in her reign, death and failing health were not so much as thought of; but it is consistent enough that the avaricious Nemesis may have closed his eyes, and taken the slight needful pains to keep her ascendancy to the end. Whilst the chapter of Tibullus's "generally unprosperous loves" cannot be regarded as in all respects edifying, it is essentially part and parcel of his life and poetry, and, all things considered, redounds far more—in what has been seen—to his credit and goodness of heart than to that of his successive paramours.