actions of Horatius Cocles, of Scævola, and of Cloelia, the battle of Regillus won by the aid of Castor and Pollux, the fall of Cremera, the touching story of Coriolanus, the still more touching story of Virginia, the wild legend about the draining of the Alban lake, the combat between Valerius Corvus and the gigantic Gaul, are among the many instances which will at once suggest themselves to every reader.

In the narrative of Livy, who was a man of fine imagination, these stories retain much of their genuine character. Nor could even the tasteless Dionysius distort and mutilate them into mere prose. The poetry shines, in spite of him, through the dreary pedantry of his eleven books. It is discernible in the most tedious and in the most superficial modern works on the early times of Rome. It enlivens the dulness of the Universal History, and gives a charm to the most meagre abridgment of Goldsmith.'-pp. 5, 6.

Of these passages some few are mythic, and belong rather to the legendary lore of the priesthood; but others demand, as it were, a popular poet for their author: for in them, though the primary facts may be, and we think doubtless are, historic, the form, the accessary incidents, the whole tone and cast, seem essentially poetic. It may be said, indeed, that this earlier and halfbarbaric state is in itself more poetical than a more regularly organized community, and that therefore its genuine history is of necessity of this more imaginative character. Poetry dwells on the individual: the sympathies of man are towards man, not men in general; and Poetry, which knows and feels its strength to lie in awakening these sympathies, delights in times when the individual is more prominent in valour, in subtlety, in power, even in suffering and in crime. The personal adventures of the king, or the warrior (who owes perhaps his kingship or his chieftainship to his personal character and prowess)—are more intimately known and interest more profoundly the tribe or race: the insult, the wrong, the virtue of a noble woman, or even of any woman who commands respect or sympathy-the Lucretia or Virginiaspreads at once through the whole people; and the poet, instead of having to create, has only to keep up the excitement-to echo the general voice, rather than be himself that voice. A single combat, at this state of half-savage warfare, there can be no doubt, often decides a battle; and a single combat of itself is more poetical (as concentring the interest on an individual, whom the imagination can picture forth in living distinctness) than a general battle, where all is confusion, and where there is nothing individual on which the mind can rest. The sister-art, as in Borgognone's battles, may illustrate this. In some indeed of these instances, according to the general tone of our observations, it is not in the incident itself, but in the manner in which it is told -not in the naked fact, but in the garb in which it is arrayed—

that

that we find the poetry. What is there improbable in the defence of a narrow and almost unapproachable bridge, against a whole army, by three brave men, who, when the bridge is broken up behind them, swim the stream? Is it prima facie unhistoric that a haughty prince should ravish the wife of one of his subjects, and the woman, in her agony and in her shame, should slay herself? or that such a crime should be the immediate stirring impulse to induce a bold people to throw off a tyrannical yoke? Still, however, there is every appearance that these stories have passed through a poetic state. We might, indeed, have suspected that the poet Livy (and in some qualifications Rome has hardly had a greater poet) may have breathed this vivifying change over the old legends of Roman glory: but it is manifest that, in most cases, his fine imagination has only seized the more poetic version of the separate incidents; much of the picturesque, the dramatic, was already before his day absolutely incorporated with the legend, and had become an inseparable part of it.

All this is more remarkable, from its striking contrast, if there was almost from the first what we will venture to call a strong prosaic element in the Roman history. We cannot but think

and no one who reads the first part of Wachsmuth's work with attention will refuse to agree with us-that there was more documentary history, more of record (imperfect indeed and fragmentary, but still authentic) in the religious books, the laws, the inscriptions, and even the treaties of the earlier ages, extant at the time of the early chroniclers, or even of the later historians, than is at present commonly supposed. If the fall of the Tarquins and the wars of Porsena are deeply tinged with poetry, the Servian constitution is plain legal prose. Even if, like some of the old laws in Greece and in the East, we can suppose that all the old constitutional law was written in metre-if, as appears probable, many of the common formularies of justice retained a metrical cadence-they are no less in direct opposition with the imaginative character of the more poetic history. They have nothing of poetry; except, perhaps, that they may show that Rome is no exception to the general law that verse is earlier than prose, and that all nations in the first stage of civilisation employ numbers in order to enfix upon the popular memory that which is to be of common usage, and to be treasured in the popular mind. We have made these observations as briefly as possible, merely in anticipation of an objection which has occurred to us, and may to others-viz., the improbability that a people so early predisposed to historic truth in a severer form should yet lend itself so early to the illusions of popular poetry. The strongly poetical character 21

VOL. LXXI. NO. CXLII.

of

of the larger portion of the history becomes under these circumstances even more unaccountable, if it had not a poetic origin. The evidence of the existence of this ballad poetry in later writers is certainly somewhat scanty. That there was some poetry, ancient Saturnian poetry-solemn verses and other religious songs, and songs sung by young men at banquets, in celebration of the 'great of old'—is clear, among other passages, from the contemptuous taunt of Ennius against his rival Nævius, for adhering to the antiquated measures of the Fauns and the Bards, and from the strongly-expressed regret of Cicero that none of these panegyrical songs had come down to his day. Mr. Macaulay has rescued another of the most direct of these testimonies from grave suspicion. Niebuhr himself quotes Dionysius of Halicarnassus as asserting that some of the old songs, those relating to Romulus and the foundation of Rome, were sung in his day

ὡς ἐν τοῖς πατρίοις ύμνοις ὑπὸ Ρωμαίων ἔτι νῦν ᾳδεται.

It always appeared to us very unaccountable that, either by good fortune or by industry, the dry Greek antiquarian of the age of Augustus should discover poetry in popular use, most likely in an antiquated dialect, of which Ennius spoke as almost out of date, and of which Cicero unquestionably had never heard a line. Mr. Macaulay, however, has perceived that Dionysius either translated the precise words, or, at furthest, paraphrased the language, of Fabius Pictor, one of the earliest of the Roman annalists; and thus what appeared to be a loose and incredible statement of Dionysius becomes a very valuable and trustworthy evidence.

We cannot refrain from introducing Mr. Macaulay's happy illustrations of the manner in which this popular poetry, by a natural transmutation, becomes history :

"History," says Hume, with the utmost gravity, "has preserved some instances of Edgar's amours, from which, as from a specimen, we may form a conjecture of the rest." He then tells very agreeably the stories of Elfleda and Elfrida; two stories which have a most suspicious air of romance, and which, indeed, greatly resemble, in their general character, some of the legends of early Rome. He cites, as his authority for these two tales, the chronicle of William of Malmesbury, who lived in the time of King Stephen. The great majority of readers suppose that the device by which Elfleda was substituted for her young mistress, the artifice by which Athelwold obtained the hand of Elfrida, the detection of that artifice, the hunting party, and the vengeance of the amorous king, are things about which there is no more doubt than about the execution of Anne Boleyn, or the slitting of Sir John Coventry's nose. But, when we turn to William of Malmesbury, we find that Hume, in his eagerness to relate these pleasant fables, has overlooked one very important circumstance. William does, indeed, tell both the

stories;

stories; but he gives us distinct notice that he does not warrant their truth, and that they rest on no better authority than that of ballads,

'Such is the way in which these two well-known tales have been handed down. They originally appeared in a poetical form. They found their way from ballads into an old chronicle. The ballads perished; the chronicle remained. A great historian, some centuries after the ballads had been altogether forgotten, consulted the chronicle. He was struck by the lively colouring of these ancient fictions: he transferred them to his pages; and thus we find inserted, as unquestionable facts, in a narrative which is likely to last as long as the English tongue, the inventions of some minstrel whose works were probably never committed to writing, whose name is buried in oblivion, and whose dialect has become obsolete. It must, then, be admitted to be possible, or rather highly probable, that the stories of Romulus and Remus, and of the Horatii and Curiatii, may have had a similar origin.

'Castilian literature will furnish us with another parallel case. Mariana, the classical historian of Spain, tells the story of the ill-starred marriage which the King Don Alonso brought about between the heirs of Carrion and the two daughters of the Cid. The Cid bestowed a princely dower on his sons-in-law. But the young men were base and proud, cowardly and cruel. They were tried in danger, and found wanting. They fled before the Moors; and once, when a lion broke out of his den, they ran and crouched in an unseemly hiding-place. They knew that they were despised, and took counsel how they might be avenged. They parted from their father-in-law with many signs of love, and set forth on a journey with Doña Elvira and Doña Sol. In a solitary place the bridegrooms seized their brides, stripped them, scourged them, and departed, leaving them for dead. But one of the house of Bivar, suspecting foul play, had followed them in disguise. The ladies. were brought back safe to the house of their father. Complaint was made to the king. It was adjudged by the Cortes that the dower given by the Cid should be returned, and that the heirs of Carrion, together with one of their kindred, should do battle against three knights of the party of the Cid. The guilty youths would have declined the combat; but all their shifts were vain. They were vanquished in the lists, and for ever disgraced, while their injured wives were sought in marriage by great princes.

'Some Spanish writers have laboured to show, by an examination of dates and circumstances, that this story is untrue. Such confutation was surely not needed: for the narrative is, on the face of it, a romance. How it found its way into Mariana's history is quite clear. He acknowledges his obligations to the old chronicles; and had doubtless before him the "Chronica del Famoso Cavallero Cid Ruy Diez Campeador," which had been printed as early as the year 1552. He little suspected that all the most striking passages in this chronicle were copied from a poem of the twelfth century, a poem of which the language and versification had long been obsolete, but which glowed with no common portion of the fire of the Iliad. Yet such was the fact. More than a century and a half after the death of Mariana, this grand old ballad, of which

212

which one imperfect copy on parchment, four hundred years old, had been preserved at Bivar, was for the first time printed. Then it was found that every interesting circumstance of the story of the heirs of Carrion was derived by the eloquent Jesuit from a song of which he had never heard, and which was composed by a minstrel whose very name had long been forgotten.'-pp. 31-36.*

How, then, did this Roman ballad poetry so utterly perish that no vestige should survive? Mr. Macaulay suggests the ordinary causes of decay-change of manners, of tastes, the complete dominion of the Grecian over the Roman mind, the misfortune that no patriotic or poetic antiquarian rose in time, no Percy or Walter Scott, to search out and to record the fragments of old song, which were dying out upon the lips of the peasantry and of the people. There are, however, peculiar to Rome, some causes of the total oblivion of this kind of natural record which may also seem worthy of consideration. The Grecian ballad poetry, the Homeric (distinguished, in Mr. Macaulay's language, from all other ballads, and, indeed, from almost all other human compositions, by transcendant merit), had an inestimable advantage besides its other inimitable excellences. At the time of its earliest, undoubtedly of its most complete, development in the Iliad and Odyssey, the wonderfully and naturally musical ear of the Greeks had perfected that most exquisite vehicle of epic song, the hexameter verse. From Homer to Nonnus this verse maintained its prescriptive and unquestioned right to be the measure of heroic and narrative poetry. None, indeed, could draw the bow like the old bard; but even in their conscious feebleness the later poets hardly ever ventured to innovate on this established law of epic song. The Saturnian verse was the native measure of Roman, or rather of Italian poetry. This Saturnian verse was unquestionably very rude, and, if we are to trust the commentator on Virgil, only rhythmical. When, therefore, Ennius naturalized the hexameter in Latin poetry, it is no wonder that all eyes were turned on the noble stranger, who at once received the honours of a citizen, and from that time was established in supremacy over Latin as well as Greek narrative poetry. In this verse Ennius himself embodied all the early history of Rome; and we have only to pass from the fragments of his work, which, though yet indulging in certain licences which were dropped by Virgil and the later writers, has some lines of very free flow and cadence, to the few Saturnian verses which

*We cannot copy this allusion to the Poema del Cid without expressing our earnest hope that Mr. Frere may one day give us more of that unrivalled version of it, some fragments of which appeared many years ago in the Appendix to Mr. Southey's Chronicle of the Campeador.

+ Carmina Saturnio metro compta ad rythmum solum componere vulgares consueverunt, Servius in Georg. ii., 385.

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