Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/148

136 him, the "Roman Callimachus." That this ambition was detrimental at times to his originality and true genius, there is abundant proof in the perusal of his elegies. His too much learning, his stores of Alexandrian archæology, overflow upon his love-elegies in such wise as to impress the reader with the unreality of the erudite wooer's compliments, and to make him cease to wonder that Cynthia jilted him for a vulgar and loutish prætor. And this was not confined to his love-poems. Where he deals with Roman and Italian legends, he is apt to overcumber them with parallels from foreign mythland: and it may be said without controversy that where he fails in perspicuity, and induces the most irrepressible tedium, is in his unmeasured doses of Greek mythology.

It is the general opinion of scholars that the essentially Roman poems of Propertius were his first attempts in poetry, and that he took the lost "Dreams," as he styles that poet's epic, of Callimachus for his model of their style. If so, it is no less probable that the self-same themes occupied his latest muse, the mean space being given up to his erotic, and, par excellence, his Cynthian elegies. From his own showing, the brilliant and fascinating mistress who bewitched him, as Lesbia and Delia (we call all three by their poets' noms de plume) had bewitched Catullus and Tibullus, was the fount and source, the be-all and end-all, of his poetic dreams and aspirations. Nevertheless, it may be doubted whether Propertius did not give, in some of his poems on early Rome, earnests of a more erudite, if a less attractive, bal-