Page:Rape of Prosperine - Claudian (1854).djvu/9

Rh Lempriere, or Smith—to the latter of which Dictionaries I would also refer the reader for a sufficient account of Claudian and his works, coupled however with what I will venture to call a very undue depreciation of his poetical powers. He is, of course, not to be ranked among the Augustan poets, but he stands, I think, high among those of the second order; and I should be inclined to place him between Lucan and Statius, as less vigorous than the former, less tumid and grandiloquent than the latter. The Raptus, undisfigured by the spirit of courtly adulation, which was his besetting sin, is perhaps as fair a specimen of his real genius as can be given. There are faults in its construction; such as the omission of the communication which Jupiter ought to make to Pluto, respecting the abduction of Proserpine—the principal event of the poem: and the unartistic way in which that event is related twice over; first, as matter of direct narrative, and then again in the colloquy between Electra and Ceres—which might induce the supposition that it had never received the finishing touches from its author, and that its conclusion had never been written. I should be glad however to find this latter conjecture disproved by the labours of some future Mai, and the fourth book, containing the wanderings of Ceres, and her ultimate discovery of her daughter, rescued from the concealment of a palimpsest, to give the desired completion to so admirable a poem.