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exploits of his ancestors were doubtless re- | after the ballads had been altogether forgotten, counted and exaggerated. If there were then consulted the chronicle. He was struck by the extant songs which gave a vivid and touching lively colouring of these ancient fictions; he description of an event, the saddest and the transferred them to his pages; and thus we most glorious in the long history of the Fabian find inserted, as unquestionable facts, in a nar house, nothing could be more natural than that rative which is likely to last as long as the the panegyrist should borrow from such songs English tongue, the inventions of some min their finest touches, in order to adorn his strel whose works were probably never com. speech. A few generations later the songs mitted to writing, whose name is buried in would perhaps be forgotten, or remembered oblivion, and whose dialect has become obsoonly by shepherds and vine-dressers. But the lete. It must then be admitted to be possible, speech would certainly be preserved in the or rather highly probable, that the stories of archives of the Fabian nobles. Fabius Pictor Romulus and Remus, and of the Horatii and would be well acquainted with a document so Curiatii, may have had a similar origin. interesting to his personal feelings, and would Castilian literature will furnish us with an insert large extracts from it in his rude chro-other parallel case. Mariana, the classical nicle. That chronicle, as we know, was the oldest to which Livy had access. Livy would at a glance distinguish the bold strokes of the forgotten poet from the dull and feeble narrative by which they were surrounded, would retouch them with a delicate and powerful pencil, and would make them immortal.

That this might happen at Rome can scarcely be doubted; for something very like this has happened in several countries, and, among others, in our own. Perhaps the theory of Perizonius cannot be better illustrated than by showing that what he supposes to have taken place in ancient times has, beyond all doubt, taken place in modern times.

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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; 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 wellknown 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

"Infamias quas post dicam magis resperserunt canHen." Edgar appears to have been most mercilessly

treated in the Anglo-Saxon ballads. Ile was the favourite of the monks; and the monks and minstrels were at deadly feud.

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, cow. ardly 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 couched in an unseemly hiding-place. They knew that they were de spised, 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 de parted, leaving them for dead. But one of the house of Bivar, suspecting foul play, had fol lowed them in disguise. The ladies were brought back safe to the house of their father. Complaint was made to the king. It was ad judged 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 forever 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 circum. stances, that this story is untrue. Such con. futation was surely not needed; for the narra tive is on the face of it a romance. How found its way into Mariana's history is quite clear. He acknowledges his obligations to the old chronicles, and had doubtless before him the "Cronica del famoso Cavallero Cid Ray 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 one imperfect copy on parchment, four hundred

*Mariana, lib. x. cap. 4

years old, had been preserved at Bivar, was | over the vanquished, which the reader wit for the first time printed. Then it was found sometimes observe. To portray a Roman of that every interesting circumstance of the story the age of Camillus or Curius as superior to of the heirs of Carrion was derived by the elo- national antipathies, as mourning over the de quent Jesuit from a song of which he had vastation and slaughter by which empire and never heard, and which was composed by a triumphs were to be won, as looking on human minstrel whose very name had long been for- suffering with the sympathy of Howard, or as gotten.* treating conquered enemies with the delicacy of the Black Prince, would be to violate all dramatic propriety. The cld Romans had some great virtues,-fortitude, temperance, veracity, spirit to resist oppression, respect for legitimate authority, fidelity in the observing of contracts, disinterestedness, ardent public spirit; but Christian charity and chivalrous generosity were alike unknown to them.

Such, or nearly such, appears to have been the process by which the lost ballad-poetry of Rome was transformed into history. To reverse that process, to transform some portions of early Roman history back into the poetry out of which they were made, is the object of this work.

In the following poems the author speaks, not in his own person, but in the persons of It would have been obviously improper to ancient minstrels who know only what a Ro- mimic the manner of any particular age or man citizen, born three or four hundred years country. Something has been borrowed, howbefore the Christian era, may be supposed to ever, from our own old ballads, and more from have known, and who are in nowise above Sir Walter Scott, the great restorer of our balthe passions and prejudices of their age and lad-poetry. To the Iliad still greater obligacountry. To these imaginary poets must be tions are due; and those obligations have been ascribed some blunders which are so obvious contracted with the less hesitation because that it is unnecessary to point them out. there is reason to believe that some of the old real blunder would have been to represent | Latin minstrels really had recourse to that inthese old poets as deeply versed in general exhaustible store of poetical images. history, and studious of chronological accuracy. To them must also be attributed the illiberal sneers at the Greeks, the furious party spirit, the contempt for the arts of peace, the love of war for its own sake, the ungenerous exultation

The

See the account which Sanchez gives of the Bivar manuscript in the first volume of the Coleccion de Poesias Castellanas anteriores al Siglo XV. Part of the story of the lords of Carrion, in the poem of the Cid, has been translated by Mr. Frere in a manner above all praise.

It would have been easy to swell this little volume to a very considerable bulk, by appending notes filled with quotations; but to a learn. ed reader such notes are not necessary; for an unlearned reader they would have little interest; and the judgment passed both by the iearned and by the unlearned on a work of the imagination will always depend much more on the general character and spirit of such a work than on minute details.

HORATIUS.

THERE can be little doubt that among those parts of early Roman history which had a poetical origin was the legend of Horatius Cocles. We have several versions of the story, and these versions differ from each other in points of no small importance. Polybius, there is reason to believe, heard the tale recited over the remains of some Consul or Prætor descended from the old Horatian patricians; for he evidently introduces it as a specimen of the narratives with which the Romans were in the habit of embellishing their funeral oratory. It is remarkable that, according to his description, Horatius defended the bridge alone, and perished in the waters. According to the chronicles which Livy and Dionysius followed, Horatius had two companions, swam safe to shore, and was loaded with honours and rewards.

two old Roman lays about the defence of the bridge; and that, while the story which Livy has transmitted to us was preferred by the multitude, the other, which ascribed the whole glory to Horatius alone, may have been the favourite with the Horatian house.

The following ballad is supposed to have been made about a hundred and twenty years after the war which it celebrates, and just be fore the taking of Rome by the Gauls. The author seems to have been an honest citizen, proud of the military glory of his country, sick of the disputes of factions, and much given to pining after good old times which had never really existed. The allusion, however, to the partial manner in which the public lands were allotted could proceed only from a plebeian; and the allusion to the fraudulent sale of spoils marks the date of the poem, and shows that the poet shared in the general discontent with which the proceedings of Camillus, after the taking of Veii, were regarded.

The penultimate syllable of the name Porse na has been shortened in spite of the authority of Niebuhr, who pronounces, without assign ing any ground for his opinion, that Martial was guilty of a decided blunder in the line,

These discrepancies are easily explained. Our own literature, indeed, will furnish an exact parallel to what may have taken place at Rome. It is highly probable that the memory of the war of Porsena was preserved by compositions much resembling the two ballads which stand first in the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. In both those ballads the English, commanded by the Percy, fight with the Scots, commanded by the Douglas. In one of the ballads, the Douglas is killed by a nameless English archer, and the Percy by a Scottish spearman in the other, the Percy slays the Douglas in single combat, and is himself made prisoner. In the former, Sir Hugh Montgomery is shot through the heart by a Northumbrian bowman: in the latter, he is taken, and exchanged for the Percy. Yet both the ballads relate to the same event, and that an event which probably took place within the memory of persons who were alive when both the bal-der; for he gives us, as a pure iambic line, lads were made. One of the minstrels says:

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"Hanc spectare manum Porsena non potuit." It is not easy to understand how any moder scholar, whatever his attainments may be,and those of Niebuhr were undoubtedly im mense,-can venture to pronounce that Martial did not know the quantity of a word which he must have uttered and heard uttered a hundred times before he left school. Niebuhr seems also to have forgotten that Martial has fellow culprits to keep him in countenance.

Horace has committed the same decided blun

"Minacis aut Etrusca Porsenæ manus."

Silius Italicus has repeatedly offended in the same way, as when he says,

"Cernitur effugiens ardentem Porsena dextram;" and again,

"Clusinum vulgus, cum, Porsena magne, jubebas."

The other poet sums up the event in the fol- A modern writer may be content to err in such owing lines:

"Thys fraye bygan at Otterborne

Bytwene the nyghte and the day;
Ther the Dowglas lost hys lyfe,

And the Percy was lede away."

company.

Niebuhr's supposition that each of the three defenders of the bridge was the representative of one of the three patrician tribes is both in genious and probable, and has been adopted

It is by no means unlikely ha there were in the following poem.

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A fearful sight it was to see
Through two long nights and days.

14.

For aged folk on crutches,

And women great with child, And mothers sobbing over babes That clung to them and smiled, And sick men borne in litters

High on the necks of slaves, And troops of sun-burned husbandmen With reaping-hooks and staves,

15.

And droves of mules and asses

Laden with skins of wine,

And endless flocks of goats and sheep,
And cħdless herds of kine,
And endless trains of wagons

That creaked beneath their weight Of corn-sacks and of household goods, Choked every roaring gate.

16.

Now, from the rock Tarpeian,
Could the wan burghers spy
The line of blazing villages
Red in the midnight sky.
The Fathers of the City,

'Tney sat all night and day,

For every hour some horseman came With tidings of dismay.

17.

To eastward and to westward

Have spread the Tuscan bands; Nor house, nor fence, nor dovecote, In Crustumerium stands. Verbenna down to Ostia

Hath wasted all the plain; Astur hath stormed Janiculum, And the stout guards are slain. 18.

I wis, in all the Senate,

There was no heart so bold,
But sore it ached, and fast it beat,
When that ill news was told.
Forthwith up rose the Consul,
Up rose the Fathers all;

In haste they girded up their gowns,
And hied them to the wall.

19.

They held a council standing
Before the River-gate;

Short time was there, ye well may guess,
For musing or debate.

Out spoke the Consul roundly:

"The bridge must straight go down ; For, since Janiculum is lost, Naught else can gave the town."

20.

Just then a scout came flying,

All wild with haste and fear: "To arms! to arms! Sir Consul; Lars Porsena is here."

On the low hills to westward

The Consul fixed his eye, And saw the swarthy storm of dust Bise fast along the sky.

21.

And nearer fast and nearer

Doth the red whirlwind come; And louder still and still more loud, From underneath that rolling cloud, Is heard the trumpet's war-note proad, The trampling and the hum. And plainly and more plainly

Now through the gloom appears, Far to left and far to right,

In broken gleams of dark-blue light, The long array of helmets bright, The long array of spears.

22.

And plainly and more plainly,

Above that glimmering line, Now might ye see the banners

Of twelve fair cities shine; But the banner of proud Clusium Was highest of them all, The terror of the Umbrian, The terror of the Gaul.

23.

And plainly and more plainly

Now might the burghers know,
By port and vest, by horse and crest,
Each warlike Lucumo.

There Cilnius of Arretium

On his fleet roan was seen; And Astur of the fourfold shield, Girt with the brand none else may wield Tolumnius with the belt of gold, And dark Verbenna from the hold By reedy Thrasymene.

21.

Fast by the royal standard,
O'erlooking all the war,
Lars Porsena of Clusium

Sate in his ivory car.
By the right wheel rode Mamilius,
Prince of the Latian name;

And by the left false Sextus,

That wrought the deed of shame.

25.

But when the face of Sextus

Was seen among the foes, A yell that rent the firmament From all the town arose. On the house-tops was no woman But spate towards him and hissed; No child but screamed out curses, And shook its little fist.

26.

But the Consul's brow was sad,
And the Consul's speech was low,
And darkly looked he at the wall,
And darkly at the foe.
"Their van will be upon us

Before the bridge goes down;
And if they once may win the bridge.
What hope to save the town?"

27.

Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the gate:

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