Later Mrs. Carlyle writes that "she [Mrs. Taylor] is deemed dangerous"; to which Carlyle adds that she was worse than dangerous-she was patronizing.16

The summation of the Carlyles' opinion of Mrs. Taylor, and the general attitude of Mill's acquaintances, is suggested by Carlyle's remark that "the Mrs. Taylor business was becoming more and more of a questionable benefit to him [Mill] (we could see), but on that subject we were strictly silent, and he was pretty still." Although Mill's reputation sustained him among his intimate friends, the opinion of his less intimate contemporaries regarding his homage to Mrs. Taylor might well be expressed in Carlyle's comment on the Autobiography-that he never read anything "sillier by a man of sense, integrity, and seriousness of mind.'' 18

It is, however, not so much what people say about Mrs. Taylor as what they do not say that causes the ardent admirer of Mill to begin casting about for an explanation of Mill's apparently isolated enthusiasm. That in any group of people who know a certain individual there is never an unanimous agreement as to the virtues of that individual is a truism. But when the cardinal virtue is seen in magnificent proportion by one, and faintly, if at all, by the others, those failing are apt to accept the situation with the same degree of concern as did the proverbial company of infantry whose latest recruit thought that he alone was in step on parade. Mill only, it appears, saw Mrs. Taylor's "all but unrivalled wisdom"--the basis of his extraordinary homage.

In striving to account for Mill's opinion of Mrs. Taylor's enormous intellectual capacity, and shying at the word 'infatuation', Courtney is forced in the end through lack of synonymous expressions to employ it.

"Infatuation, for infatuation it can only be when a man of Mill's intellectual eminence allows himself to describe his friend in terms of such unbounded adulation-'were I capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be

16 Courtney, op. cit., p. 113.

18 Letter to John Carlyle, Nov. 5, 1873.

17 Reminiscences, loc. cit.

the medium of a greater benefit to it than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom."' 19

That it was an intellectual infatuation, however, is apparent from this and other tributes, and he who reads them should attempt to discover with the assistance of biographer and critic the reason for the infatuation which causes Mill's many pages to "ring with the dithyrambic praise of his 'almost infallible counsellor.'' 20

In a theory presented by Courtney lies for many people the entire solution of Mill's intellectual infatuation for Mrs. Taylor. It would seem unnecessary to remark that this infatuation had no basis in the cynical explanation that Mrs. Taylor captivated Mill by serving as an echo of his own opinions," were it not that Courtney's theory, by some, is confused with it. Says Courtney:

"When a clever woman gives expression to some of the thoughts which, in the man's case, are the results of hard thinking, he is apt to imagine that she, too, must have been through a similar mental discipline, and that there is as much behind her expression of the thought as there would be if he had made use of it. A man habitually underrates the woman's quickness of apprehension, and her delicate and intuitive insight into some of the problems with which he has been wrestling. He admires her, therefore, in proportion to the seriousness of his own logic, not in reference to her own native powers." 19 22

Mill himself, had he been inquiring into the reasons for intellectual infatuation, would never have accepted this explanation; but his very rejection of it appears, at least, to account for his. isolated opinion of Mrs. Taylor.

Intellectual infatuation! A "very will-o'-wispish iridescence of a creature; pale, passionate, sad-looking; a living-romance heroine of the royalest volition and questionable destiny" —and Courtney bridges the chasm with a theory on the cleverness of

19 Op. cit., p. 115.

22

Op. cit., p. 117.

20 Ibid., p. 112.

21 Bain, op. cit., p. 117. 23 The description of Mrs. Taylor is Carlyle's.

women: "Quickness of apprehension, delicate and intuitive insight.

On one occasion, when Morley named Mrs. Taylor to Carlyle, who was the only one among his friends who knew her, Carlyle said something like this:

"She was a woman full of unwise intellect, always asking questions about all sorts of puzzles-why, how, what for, what makes the exact difference-and Mill was good at

Yet in all fairness to Mrs. Taylor might it not be said that it took at least a clever person to inquire intelligently of Mill'why, how, what for, what makes the exact difference'; and that it required a woman of remarkable mental gymnastics, at least, to assimilate Mill's answers with a degree of intelligent promptness sufficient to infatuate him mentally. "A clever and remarkable woman," says the younger brother, "but nothing like what John took her to be."

The University of Illinois.

24 Morley, loc cit.

GUY LINTON DIFFENBAUGH.

PROPERTIUS, KIN TO THE ROMANTICS

Among the elegiac poets of Augustan Rome, Sextus Propertius stands as one different and apart. Of all those of his contemporaries who sang of love, none is like him in powerful, romantic emotionalism. Horace dealt with love playfully, satirically; Tibullus placidly, sincerely; Ovid artificially, making of his love poetry "a study of psychological observation". To Propertius, in spite of the Alexandrian artificiality of his language, passion is real and deep and rending to heart and soul. If Tibullus is like Wordsworth in his calmness, Propertius is like Byron, or like Werther in his "sudden transitions from sorrow to immoderate joy, and from sweet melancholy to violent passion".

This difference from his contemporaries has always caused remark. Some of the comments of the critics of Propertius are most suggestive. Mackail points to him as the first appearance in literature of the neurotic young man;2 and Postgate says, "In his employment of sentiment Propertius is modern and even romantic". It is, then, as a strange figure, a romantic figure in classical Rome, that we must consider him, a figure that shows its kinship to the passionate, introspective, nature-worshipping young radicals and innovators of the Romantic Period.

It is not a question here of the influence of Propertius upon romantic writers. There is comparatively little to be traced. The undoubted difficulty of his poetry has made against popularity. There have even been comparatively few editions, and translations of Propertius were almost entirely lacking during the Romantic Period, especially in England. There was no complete English translation until that which appeared in 1854 in Bohn's Classical Library. Young poets tried their hands on Ovid and Tibullus, but rarely on Propertius. Gray translated

1 Seliar, W. Y.: The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age; Horace and the Elegiac Poets (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1892), p. 324.

3

Mackail, J. W.: Latin Literature (New York: Scribner's, 1909), p. 125. Select Elegies of Propertius (ed. by J. P. Postgate. London: Macmillan & Co., 1911), Introd., p. lxxvi.

or imitated portions of two of the elegies in 1738 and 1742, and Postgate has pointed out the possibility of the influence of Propertius upon the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. G. F. Nott translated the Cynthia Monobiblos in 1782, and Sir Charles Abraham Elton included commonplace versions of twenty of the elegies in the slender volume of 1810 entitled Tales of Romance. On the continent there were a few Italian, French, and German translations in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Of Propertian scholarship the bulk has been German, although Holland has also proved hospitable. Little was done in England, and that little was much later than the Romantic Period.

It is in Germany that we can trace real literary influence. Goethe, whom Schiller called the German Propertius, wrote on November 28, 1798, to von Knebel, thanking him for his translation of the Propertian elegies and saying: “They have produced an agitation in my nature, such as works of this kind usually cause: a desire to produce something similar which I must evade, as at present I have quite other things in view." Yet in 17881789 he had produced "something similar" in his Roman Elegies, written in express imitation of the "triumviri amoris", as Joseph Scaliger called Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius. The similarity is stressed by the last two lines of the fifth elegy:

"Amor schüret die Lamp' indess und denket der Zeiten

Da er den nämlichen Dienst seinen Triumvirn gethan."

That he had in mind especially the third of this triumvirate, is clear from his correspondence with Schiller in 1795 and 1796. When he wrote to Schiller concerning the publication of the Roman Elegies in Die Hören, he referred to them as "Properz

'III, 5, 19-48, and II, 1, 17-78, omitting 37-39. All references to the Elegies of Propertius are to the text found in the edition by Hosius, in the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana, Lipsiae, MCMXI. 5 Postgate, op. cit., lxxxiii, lxxxiv.

This passage is misquoted in Postgate, op. cit., cxlvii-cxlviii, where it is erroneously given as an entry in Goethe's diary. It is quoted by Postgate at second hand from the Introduction to Jacob and Binder's German translation of Propertius (Stuttgart, 1860). They, in turn, quote it, with one or two unimportant variations, from Reimer, Fr. W., Mittheilungen über Goethe, Berlin, 1841, Vol. II, p. 646. Reimer gives no authority.