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CHAPTER IV.

CONJUGAL POETRY.

If it be generally true, that Love, to be poetical, must be wreathed with the willow and the cypress, as well as the laurel and the myrtle,still it is not always true. It is not, happily, a necessary condition, that a passion, to be constant, must be unfortunate; that faithful lovers must needs be wretched; that conjugal tenderness and "domestic doings" are ever dull and invariably prosaic. The witty invectives of some of our poets, whose domestic misery stung them into satirists, and blasphemers of a happiness denied to them, are familiar in the memory-ready on

the lips of common-place scoffers. But of matrimonial poetics, in a far different style, we have instances sufficient to put to shame such heartless raillery; that there are not more, is owing to the reason which Klopstock has given, when writing of his angelic Meta. "A man," said he, should speak of his wife as seldom and with as much modesty as of himself.”

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A woman is not under the same restraint in speaking of her husband; and this distinction arises from the relative position of the two sexes. It is a species of vain-glory to boast of a possession; but we may exult, unreproved, in the virtues of him who disposes of our fate. Our inferiority has here given to us, as women, so high and dear a privilege, that it is a pity we have been so seldom called on to exert it.

The first instance of conjugal poetry which occurs to me, will perhaps startle the female reader, for it is no other than the gallant Ovid himself. One of the epistles, written during his banishment to Pontus, is addressed to his wife Perilla, and very tenderly alludes to their mutual

affection, and to the grief she must have suffered during his absence.

And thou, whom young I left when leaving Rome,

Thou, by my woes art haply old become :

Grant, heaven! that such I may behold thy face,

And thy changed cheek, with dear loved kisses trace;

Fold thy diminished person, and exclaim,

Regret for me has thinned this beauteous frame.

Here then we have the most abandoned libertine of his profligate times reduced at last in his old age, in disgrace and exile, to throw himself, for sympathy and consolation, into the arms of a tender and amiable wife; and this, after spending his life and talents in deluding the tenderness, corrupting the virtue, and reviling the characters of women. In truth, half a dozen volumes in praise of our sex could scarce say more than this.

Every one, I believe, recollects the striking story of Paulina, the wife of Seneca. When the order was brought from Nero that he should die, she insisted upon dying with him, and by the same operation. She accordingly prepared to be bled to death; but fainting away in the midst of her

sufferings, Seneca commanded her wounds to be bound up, and conjured her to live. She lived therefore; but excessive weakness and loss of blood gave her, during the short remainder of her life, that spectral appearance which has caused her conjugal fidelity and her pallid hue to pass into a proverb,-" As pale as Seneca's Paulina ;" and be it remembered, that Paulina was at this time young in comparison of her husband, who was old, and singularly ugly.

This picturesque story of Paulina affects us in our younger years; but at a later period we are more likely to sympathise with the wife of Lucan, Polla Argentaria, who beheld her husband perish by the same death as his uncle Seneca, and, through love for his fame, consented to survive him. She appears to have been the original after whom he drew his beautiful portrait of Cornelia, the wife of Pompey. Lucan had left the manuscript of the Pharsalia in an imperfect state; and his wife, who had been in its progress his amanuensis, his counsellor and confidant, and therefore

best knew his wishes and intentions, undertook to revise and copy it with her own hand. During the rest of her life, which was devoted to this dear and pious task, she had the bust of Lucan always placed beside her couch, and his works lying before her: and in the form in which Polla Argentaria left it, his great poem has descended to our times.

I have read also, though I confess my acquaintance with the classics is but limited, of a certain Latin poetess Sulpicia, who celebrated her husband Calenas: and the poet Ausonius composed many fine verses in praise of a beatiful and virtuous wife, whose name I forget.*

But I feel I am treading unsafe ground, rendered so both by my ignorance, and by my prejudices as a woman. Generally speaking, the heroines of classical poetry and history are not much to my taste; in their best virtues they were a little masculine, and in their vices, so completely

* Elton's Specimens.