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140 and knowledge may, it is true, impart strength to this conjecture; but assuredly a fair comparison of all the data we can collect from external and internal sources towards the life of Propertius does not lead to the conclusion that he was one to intrude himself on the great or the successful, or that lack of opportunities of introduction to the court of Augustus, or the villa and gardens of Mæcenas, drove him to annoyance and importunity of such as had the entrée to either. It has always seemed to us a strong note of difference, that Horace's babbling fop is represented as addressing his victim in short cut-and-dried interjective remarks, the very opposite of the high-sounding, learned, and perhaps stilted language which might have been expected of Propertius, a poet who, one should fancy, spoke, if he did not care to write, heroics—even as Mrs Siddons is said to have been, and talked, the queen, even off the stage. Considering the field open to him, and the invitations profusely given to him, this poet is entitled to the credit of extreme moderation as regards the incense heaped, after the fashion of his poetic contemporaries, upon the shrine of Augustus. His noted poem on the "Battle of Actium" is a fine and grand treatment of a theme upon which to have been silent would have been as much an admission of inability to hold his own as a poet, as a proof of indifference or disloyalty to the victor in that famous fight; and who of his contemporaries would have thought anything of the pretensions of a bard who did not