The Romance of Biography (Vol 1 of 2)

al loves in the days of fables and of demi-gods; or in those pastoral ages when shepherds were kings and poets: the loves of Orpheus and Eurydice are a litt

preserved to our times, show too plainly in what light we were then regarded; and graceful and exquisite as many of them are, they bear about them the taint of degraded morals

hrough the long lapse of ages, bright names, and little else; a kind of half-real,-half-ideal impersonations of love and song; the one envelope

rest, no respect for the objects of it. How, indeed, should that be possible, when their mistresses, even according to the lover's painting, were all either perfectly insipid, or utterly abandoned and odious?[1] Ovid, he who has revealed to mortal ears "all the soft scandal of the laughing sky," and whose gallantry has become proverbial, represents himself as so incensed by the public and shameless infidelities of his Corinna, that he treats her with th

r her and for himself; and he confesses that he is become, for her sake, the laughing-stock of all Rome. Cynthia is the only one of these classical loves who seems to have possessed any mental accomplishments. The poet praises, incidentally, her talents for music and poetry; but not as if they added to her charms or enhanced her value in his estimation. The

eared in their own, degraded by every vice, and in every sense contemptible; beings, not only beyond the pale of our sympathy, but of our toleration. Throughout their works, virtue appears a mere jest: Love stript of his divinity, even by those who f

at and polished people, rich with a thousand beauties of thought and style, doubtless they have their value and their merit: but as monuments also of a state of morals inconceivably gross and corrupt; of the condition of women degraded by their own vices, the vices and tyranny of the other sex, and the prevalence of the E

TNO

the lyrical poets of Rome is abridged from the analysis

wife of Quintu

ereurs de Constantinople, pour les engager à br?ler les ouvrages de plusieurs anciens po?tes Grecs, et en particulier de ceux qui parlaient des amours, &c. * * * Ces prèt

a time when the mania of classical learning was