and that an event which probably took place within the memory of persons who were alive when both the ballads were made. One of the minstrels says:

"Old men that knowen the grounde well yenoughe

Call it the battell of Otterburn:

At Otterburn began this spurne

Upon a monnyn day.

Ther was the dougghte Doglas slean :

The Perse never went away."

The other poet sums up the event in the following lines:

"Thys fraye bygan at Otterborne

Bytwene the nyghte and the day:
Ther the Dowglas lost hys lyfe,
And the Percy was lede away."

It is by no means unlikely that there were 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 favorite 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 before 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 Porsena has been shortened in spite of the authority of Niebuhr, who pronounces, without assigning any ground for his opinion, that Martial was guilty of a decided blunder in the line,

"Hanc spectare manum Porsena non potuit."

It is not easy to understand how any modern scholar, whatever his attainments may be, and those of Niebuhr were undoubtedly immense,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 blunder; for he gives us, as a pure iambic line,

"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." A modern writer may be content to err in such 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 ingenious and probable, and has been adopted in the following poem.

HORATIUS

A LAY MADE ABOUT THE YEAR OF THE CITY CCCLX

I

LARS PORSENA of Clusium

By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.
By the Nine Gods he swore it,
And named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,
East and west and south and north,

East and west and south and north
The messengers ride fast,
And tower and town and cottage

Have heard the trumpet's blast.
Shame on the false Etruscan

Who lingers in his home,
When Porsena of Clusium
Is on the march for Rome.

III

The horsemen and the footmen
Are pouring in amain

From many a stately market-place,
From many a fruitful plain,
From many a lonely hamlet,

Which, hid by beech and pine,

Like an eagle's nest, hangs on the crest Of purple Apennine;

IV

From lordly Volaterræ,

Where scowls the far-famed hold

Piled by the hands of giants

For godlike kings of old; From seagirt Populonia,

Whose sentinels descry Sardinia's snowy mountain-tops Fringing the southern sky;

V

From the proud mart of Pisæ,
Queen of the western waves,
Where ride Massilia's triremes
Heavy with fair-haired slaves;
From where sweet Clanis wanders
Through corn and vines and flowers;
From where Cortona lifts to heaven
Her diadem of towers.

Fat are the stags that champ the boughs

Of the Ciminian hill;

Beyond all streams Clitumnus

Is to the herdsman dear;

Best of all pools the fowler loves

The great Volsinian mere.

VII

But now no stroke of woodman

Is heard by Auser's rill;

No hunter tracks the stag's green path
Up the Ciminian hill;
Unwatched along Clitumnus
Grazes the milk-white steer;
Unharmed the water fowl may dip
In the Volsinian mere.

VIII

The harvests of Arretium,

This year, old men shall reap; This year, young boys in Umbro Shall plunge the struggling sheep; And in the vats of Luna,

This year, the must shall foam Round the white feet of laughing girls Whose sires have marched to Rome.

IX

There be thirty chosen prophets,

The wisest of the land, Who alway by Lars Porsena

Both morn and evening stand: Evening and morn the Thirty

Have turned the verses o'er, Traced from the right on linen white By mighty seers of yore.

X

And with one voice the Thirty
Have their glad answer given :

"Go forth, go forth, Lars Porsena;
Go forth, beloved of Heaven;
Go, and return in glory

To Clusium's royal dome;

And hang round Nurscia's altars

The golden shields of Rome."