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152 extravagant in her addiction to dress, unguents, and ornaments; and a victim to the indulgence of the wine-cup, though the poet does not seem to have found so much fault with this, as with her partiality for the foreign worship of Isis, for which it will be recollected that Delia also had a weakness. All these proclivities suggest the costliness of such a union as that which, as far as we can judge, subsisted between Propertius and Cynthia,—not a union recognised by law, but a connection occupying the borderland between recognised respectability and open vice. Whilst a touching elegy (II. vii.) congratulates Cynthia on the throwing out or postponement of a law which would have obliged Propertius to take a wife and to desert his mistress, it is obvious that he enjoyed his immunity at a very costly price, to say nothing of her keen eye to the main chance, which made him justly fearful of the approach of richer admirers. Mr Cranstoun infers from the twentieth elegy of the fourth book "that a marriage of some sort existed between Propertius and Cynthia, in which the rights and duties of the contracting parties were laid down and ratified;" and doubtless such compacts were really made at Rome, even where, as in this case, legal matrimony was out of the question. But the bond was of a shifting and elastic nature; and if Propertius hugged his chain, it must have been with a grim sense at times of the cost and disquiet which it entailed upon him. Cynthia was dressy and extravagant, and if she took the air, loved to tire her hair in the newest fashion, wear the diaphanous silk fabrics of Cos, and