spite of himself, and he goes through the
catalogue of the topics. Nothing can be better or more ballad-like than
the blunt declaration by Horatius of his readiness to keep the bridge:--

"Then out spoke bold Horatius,
The captain of the gate:
'To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?'"

Not one other word should stout old Cocles have uttered, of apology for
claiming to himself the post of danger and of death. No higher motive
need he have assigned than those contained in the last two lines, which
must have gone home at once to the heart of every Roman. But the poet
will not leave him there. He interpolates another stanza, which has the
effect of diluting the strength of the passage.

"'And for the tender mother
Who dandled him to rest,
And for the wife who nurses
Her baby at her breast;
And for the holy maidens
Who feed the eternal flame,
To save them from false Sextus
That wrought the deed of shame?'"

The whole of this stanza is bad;--the last four lines of it simply and
purely execrable. Mr Macaulay is far too judicious a critic not to be
fully aware of the danger of any weak passage in a short poem of
incident; and we trust, in the next edition, to see this palpable
eye-sore removed. But it is in the ballad of Virginia that his besetting
tendency towards declamation becomes most thoroughly apparent. You are
to suppose yourself in the market-place of Rome;--the lictors of
Claudius have seized upon the daughter of the centurion; the people have
risen in wrath at the outrage; and, for a moment, there is hope of
deliverance. But the name of the decemvir still carries terror with it,
and the commons waver at the sound. In this crisis, Icilius, the
betrothed of the virgin, appears, and delivers a long essay of some
fifty double lines, upon the spirit and tendency of the Roman
constitution. This is a great error. Speeches, when delivered in the
midst of a popular tumult, must be pithy in order to be effective: nor
was Appius such an ass as to have lost the opportunity afforded him by
this dialectic display, of effectually securing his captive.

There is no literary legacy the people of Scotland ought to be so
thankful as for their rich inheritance of national ballads. In this
respect they stand quite unriv