e the precious relics of
the Minstrelsy of the Border. In Germany, the lay of the
Nibelungs had been long utterly forgotten, when, in the
eighteenth century, it was, for the first time, printed from a
manuscript in the old library of a noble family. In truth, the
only people who, through their whole passage from simplicity to
the highest civilization, never for a moment ceased to love and
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 remarkable reference 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 gu