the authoress of sixteen elegiac couplets, in which she gives vent to the indignation excited by the proposals of an unworthy suitor-- stringing together a long series of the most absurd and unnatural combinations, all of which are to be considered as fitting and appropriate in comparison with such an union. The idea of the piece was evidently suggested by the Virgilian lines
Mopso Nisa datur; quid non speremus amantes?
Jungentur jam grypes equis; aevoque sequenti
Cum canibus timidi venient ad pocula damae, while in tone and spirit it bears some resemblance to the Ibis ascribed to Ovid, and to the Dirae of Valerius Cato. The presumptuous wooer is called a rusticus servus, by which we must clearly understand, not a slave in the Roman acceptation of the term, but one of those villani or serfs who, according to the ancient practice in Germany and Gaul, were considered as part of the live stock indissolubly bound to the soil which they cultivated. From this circumstance, from the introduction here and there of a barbarous word, from the fact that most of the original MSS. of these verses were found in France, and that the name of Eucherius was common in that country in the fifth and sixth centuries we may form a guess as to the period when this poetess flourished, and as to the land of her nativity; but we possess no evidence which can entitle us to speak with any degree of confidence. (Wernsdorf, Poet. Lat. Min. vol. iii. p. lxv. and p. 97, vol. iv. pt. ii. p. 827, vol. v. pt. iii. p. 1458; Burmann, Anthol. Lat. 5.133, or n. 385, ed. Meyer.)
[W.R]