Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/88

v I V 1 Drenthe, N.E. by Hanover (Prussia), S.E. by Westphalia (Prussia), and S. and S.W. by Guelderland, with an area of 1291 square miles. The southern district belongs to the basin of the Yssel ; the northern is watered by the Vecht and various small streams falling into the Zwarte- water, the river which was for so many generations the object of dispute between Zwolle and Hasselt. A large proportion of the surface is a sandy flat relieved by hillocks, rising at times to a height of 230 feet above the sea. Husbandry, stock-raising, and dairy-farming are the prin cipal means of subsistence in the province, though the fisheries, turf-cutting, the shipping trade, and a number of manufacturing industries are also of importance. In the district of Tweuthe (towards the east) more especially there are a great many cotton-mills and bleaching-works ; brick and tile making is prosecuted in the neighbourhood of the Yssel; and along the coast a good many people are engaged in making mats and besoms. During the present century the province has been opened up by the construction of several large canals the Dedemsvaart, the Noord-Willems- vaart (between the Yssel and the Zwartewater), the "Overyssel canals" (running near the eastern frontier), &e.; and a fairly complete railway system has come into existence. The province is divided into the three adminis trative districts of Zwolle, Deventer, and Almelo. Its popu lation, 234,376 in 1859 and 263,008 in 1875 (134,201 males, 128,807 females), was 247,136 in 1879. Of the total for 1875, 181,863 were Protestants, 76,891 Roman Catholics, and 4018 Jews. The chief town, Zwolle, had in 1879 a communal population of 22,759, and there were fourteen other communes with more than 2000 inhabitants, including Deventer, 19,162; Kampen, 17,444; Almelo, 7758; Hengelo, 6502. Both the present name Overyssel and the older designation Oversticht are explained by the fact that the province lies mainly oil the other side of the Yssel from Utrecht, with which it long constituted an episcopal principality. Vollenhove was bestowed on the bishops in 943, Oldenzaal in 970, the land north-east of Vollenhove in 1042, Deventer in 1046, a part of Salland in 1226, the countship of Goor in 1248, the lordship of Diepenheim in 1331, anl that of Almelo in 1406. In 1527 Bishop Henry of Bavaria alvised the recognition of Charles V. as protector and ruler of the district, and Oversticht became Overyssel. It was the sixth province to join the Union in 1579. During the French occupa tion it bore the name of the department of Bouches de 1 Issel. OVID (P. OVIDIUS NASO) was the last in order. of time of the poets of the Augustan age, whose works have given to it the distinction of ranking among the great eras in the history of human culture. As is the case with most other Roman writers, his personal history has to be gathered almost entirely from his own writings. The materials for his life are partly the record of the immediate impressions of the time in which they were written con tained in the Amores, partly the reminiscences of his happier days, to which his mind constantly recurred in the writings from his place of exile. His life is almost coincident in extent with that of the Augustan age. The year of his birth, 43 B.C., the year of the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa, which inter vened between the death of Julius Caesar and the partition of the Roman world among the Triumvirs, may be regarded as the last year of the republic. It was the year of the death of Cicero, which marks the close of the re publican literature. Thus the only form of political life known to Ovid was that of the ascendency and absolute rule of Augustus and his successor. His character was neither strengthened nor sobered, like that of his older con temporaries, by personal recollection of the crisis through which the republic passed into the empire. There is no sense of political freedom in any of his writings. The spirit inherited from his ancestors was that of the Italian country districts and municipia, not that of Rome. He was sprung from the Peligni, one of the four small mountain peoples whose proudest memories were of the part they had played in the Social War. They had no old race-hostility with Rome, such as that which made the most powerful representative of the Sabellian stock remain till the last her implacable enemy ; and their opposition to the senatorian aristocracy in the Social War would predispose them to accept the empire. Ovid belonged by birth to the same social class as Tibullus and Propertius, that of old hereditary landowners ; but he was more fortunate than they in the immunity which his native district enjoyed from the confiscations made by the triumvirs. His native town and district, Sulmo, lay high among the Apennines, and is described by Mr Hare as "grandly situated on an isolated platform, backed by snowy mountains." The poet himself describes this district as remarkable for the abundance of its streams and for its salubrity " Parva, sed irriguis ora salubris aquis ;" and he recalls the fresh charm of its scenery from the desolate waste of his Scythian exile. To his early life in such a district he may have owed his eye for natural beauty, and that interest in the common sights of the country which relieves the monotony of his life of pleasure in Rome and the dreary record of the life spent within the walls of Tomi, and enables him to add the charm of natural scenery to the romantic creations of his fancy. The pure air of this mountain home may have contributed to the vigorous vitality which prevented the life of plea sure from palling on him, and which beats strongly even through all the misery of his exile. But if this vitality with its natural accompaniment, a keen capacity for enjoyment was a gift due to his birthplace, it was apparently a gift transmitted to him by inheritance : for he tells us that his father lived till the age of ninety, and that he performed the funeral rites to his mother after his father s death. While he mentions both with the piety characteristic of the old Italian, he tells us little more about them than that " their thrift curtailed his youthful expenses," 1 and that his father did what he could to dissuade him from poetry, and to force him into the more profitable career of the law courts. He had one brother, exactly a year older than himself, who, after showing promise as a speaker, died at the age of twenty. The tone in which Ovid speaks of him is indicative of sincere affection, but not of such depth of feeling as was called forth in Catullus by a similar loss. The two brothers had been brought early to Rome for their education, where they attended the lectures of the most eminent rhetoricians of their time. Education had become more purely rhetorical and literary, less philosophical and political, than it had been in a pre vious generation. Ovid is said to have attended these lectures eagerly, and to have shown in his exercises that his gift was poetical rather than oratorical, and that he had a distaste for the severer processes of thought. Like Pope, "he lisped in numbers," and he wrote and destroyed many verses before he published anything. The earliest edition of the Amores, which first appeared in five books, and the Heroides were given by him to the world at an early age. He courted the society of the older and younger poets of his time, and formed one among those friendly coteries who read or recited their works to one another before they gave them to the world. " He had only seen Virgil " ; but Virgil s friend and contemporary yEmilius Macer used in his advanced years to read his didactic epic to him ; and, although there is no indication in the works of either the reigning or the rising poet of any intimacy between them, even the fastidious Horace sometimes delighted his ears 1 Ex Ponto, i. 8, 42.