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language: often, too, he introduces a sentimental touch, i.e. he either attributes feeling to inanimate objects, or looks at the scene from the point of view of some living person: in ix. 90 the sea-resisting rock “feels no fear,” or in the simile of the snake renewing its skin (iv. 93 sq.) a countryman is introduced (“a! miser agrestum,” etc.) Some of his similes are worthy of notice, for example, that which compares the calm produced by the majesty of Jove’s utterance to that of lakes and streams under the tranquil influence of summer (iii. 253), or that of Pluto coming into his inheritance of the underworld (xi. 443). But we get rather tired of the endless bulls and boars to which his heroes are compared.

(III.) Of Statius’s inequality as a poet it is hardly necessary to speak; he suffers from lack of judgement, rising now to the wildest heights of exaggeration and bombast, and now sinking to trivial and absurd detail, as when persons are described kissing each other through closed visors (“galeis iuvat oscula clausis inserere,” iv. 20), or when Mercury’s hat gets wet in the rainstorms of Thrace (vii. 39). At the same time there are lines of great poetic beauty: i. 336–341, a beautiful description of the rising moon, “her airy chariot hung with pearly dew” (Pope’s transl.), and of Sleep’s mysterious influence; or the moonbeams glinting on the bronze armour of the ambuscade (ii. 532), or a picture of sunrise on the fields in winter (iii. 468–9), or the last breeze dying away on drooping sails (i. 479–481); again, in i. 264–5, we seem to hear the beating of the gongs and the wailing of votaries by some sacred river of the East, while the mysterious figure of the Lydian Bacchus, the spirit of the golden river, appears dimly in “aut Hermi de