admire their old ballads, were the Greeks.
That the early Romans should have had ballad-poetry, and that

this poetry should have perished, is therefore not strange. It
would, on the contrary, have been strange if these things had not

come to pass; and we should be justified in pronouncing them
highly probable even if we had no direct evidence on the subject.

But we have direct evidence of unquestionable authority.
Ennius, who flourished in the time of the Second Punic War, was

regarded in the Augustan age as the father of Latin poetry. He
was, in truth, the father of the second school of Latin poetry,

the only school of which the works have descended to us. But from
Ennius himself we learn that there were poets who stood to him in

the same relation in which the author of the romance of Count
Alarcos stood to Garcilaso, or the author of the Lytell Geste of

Robyn Hode to Lord Surrey. Ennius speaks of verses which the
Fauns and the Bards were wont to chant in the old time, when none

had yet studied the graces of speech, when none had yet climbed
the peaks sacred to the Goddesses of Grecian song. ``Where,''

Cicero mournfully asks, ``are those old verses now?''
Contemporary with Ennius was Quintus Fabius Pactor, the earliest

of the Roman annalists. His account of the infancy and youth of
Romulus and Remus has been preserved by Dionysius, and contains a

very remarkablereference to the ancient Latin poetry. Fabius
says that, in his time, his countrymen were still in the habit of

singing ballads about the Twins. ``Even in the hut of
Faustulus,''--so these old lays appear to have run,--``the

children of Rhea and Mars were, in port and in spirit, not like
unto swineherds or cowherds, but such that men might well guess

them to be of the blood of kings and gods.''
Cato the Censor, who also lived in the days of he Second Punic

War, mentioned this lost literature in his lost work on the
antiquities of his country. Many ages, he said, before his time,

there were ballads in praise of illustrious men; and these
ballads it was the fashion for the guests at banquets to sing in

turn while the piper played. ``Would,'' exclaims Cicero, ``that
we still had the old ballads of which Cato speaks!''

Valerius Maximus gives us exactly similar information, without
mentioning his authority, and observes that the ancient Roman

ballads were probably of more benefit to the young than all the
lectures of the Athenian schools, and that to the influence of

the national poetry were to be ascribed the virtues of such men
as Camillus and Fabricus.

Varro, whose authority on all questions connected with the
antiquities of his country is entitled to the greatest respect,

tells us that at banquets it was once the fashion for boys to
sing, sometimes with and sometimes without instrumental music,

ancient ballads in praise of men of former times. These young
performers, he observes, were of unblemished character, a

circumstance which he probably mentioned because, among the
Greeks, and indeed, in his time among the Romans also, the morals

of singing boys were in no high repute.
The testimony of Horace, though given incidentally, confirms the

statements of Cato, Valerius Maximus, and Varro. The poet
predicts that, under the peacefuladministration of Augustus, the

Romans will, over their full goblets, sing to the pipe, after the
fashion of their fathers, the deeds of brave captains, and the

ancient legends touching the origin of the city.
The proposition, then, that Rome had ballad-poetry is not merely

in itself highly probable, but is fully proved by direct evidence
of the greatest weight.

This proposition being established, it becomes easy to understand
why the early history of the city is unlike almost everything

else in Latin literature, native where almost everything else is
borrowed, imaginative where almost everything else is prosaic. We

can scarcely hesitate to pronounce that the magnificent,
pathetic, and truly national legends, which present so striking a

contrast to all that surrounds them, are broken and defaced
fragments of that early poetry which, even in the age of Cato the

Censor, had become antiquated, and of which Tully had never heard
a line.

That this poetry should have been suffered to perish will not
appear strange when we consider how complete was the triumph of

the Greek genius over the public mind of Italy. It is probable
that, at an early period, Homer and Herodotus furnished some

hints to the Latin Minstrels; but it was not till after the war
with Pyrrhus that the poetry of Rome began to put off its old

Ausonian character. The transformation was soon consummated. The
conquered, says Horace, led captive the conquerors. It was

precisely at the time at which the Roman people rose to
unrivalled political ascendency that they stooped to pass under

the intellectual yoke. It was precisely at the time at which the
sceptre departed from Greece that the empire of her language and

of her arts became universal and despotic. The revolution indeed
was not effected without a struggle. Naevius seems to have been

the last of the ancient line of poets. Ennius was the founder of
a new dynasty. Naevius celebrated the First Punic War in

Saturnian verse, the old national verse of Italy. Ennius sang the
Second Punic War in numbers borrowed from the Iliad. The elder

poet, in the epitaph which he wrote for himself, and which is a
fine specimen of the early Roman diction and versification,

plaintively boasted that the Latin language had died with him.
Thus what to Horace appeared to be the first faint dawn of Roman

literature appeared to Naevius to be its hopelesssetting. In
truth, one literature was setting, and another dawning.

The victory of the foreign taste was decisive; and indeed we can
hardly blame the Romans for turning away with contempt from the

rude lays which had delighted their fathers, and giving their
whole admiration to the immortal productions of Greece. The

national romances, neglected by the great and the refined whose
education had been finished at Rhodes or Athens, continued, it

may be supposed, during some generations to delight the vulgar.
While Virgil, in hexameters of exquisite modulation, described

the sports of rustics, those rustics were still singing their
wild Saturnian ballads. It is not improbable that, at the time

when Cicero lamented the irreparable loss of the poems mentioned
by Cato, a search among the nooks of the Appenines, as active as

the search which Sir Walter Scott made among the descendents of
the mosstroopers of Liddesdale, might have brought to light many

fine remains of ancient minstrelsy. No such search was made. The
Latin ballads perished forever. Yet discerning critics have

thought that they could still perceive in the early history of
Rome numerous fragments of this lost poetry, as the traveller on

classic ground sometimes finds, built into the heavy wall of a
fort or convent, a pillar rich with acanthus leaves, or a frieze

where the Amazons and Bacchanals seem to live. The theatres and
temples of the Greek and the Roman were degraded into the

quarries of the Turk and the Goth. Even so did the ancient
Saturnian poetry become the quarry in which a crowd of orators

and annalists found the materials for their prose.
It is not difficult to trace the process by which the old songs

were transmuted into the form which they now wear. Funeral
panegyric and chronicle appear to have been the intermediate

links which connected the lost ballads with the histories now
extant. From a very early period it was the usage that an oration

should be pronounced over the remains of a noble Roman. The
orator, as we learn from Polybius, was expected, on such

occasions, to recapitulate all the services which the ancestors
of the deceased had, from the earliest time, rendered to the

commonwealth. There can be little doubt that the speaker on whom
this duty was imposed would make use of all the stories suited to

his purpose which were to be found in the popular lays. There can
be as little doubt that the family of an eminent man would

preserve a copy of the speech which had been pronounced over his
corpse. The compilers of the early chronicles would have recourse

to these speeches; and the great historians of a later period