spread over Europe, and infected the English poetry as badly as any. The thoughts of our poets in the Elizabethan age often look the stronger because they are complicated and twisted. We have the boldness to confess that we are no admirers of the Elizabethan style. Shakespeare stood alone in a fresh and vigorous and vast creation: yet even his first-born were foul offenders, bearing on their brows the curse of a fallen state. Elsewhere, in every quarter, we are at once slumberous and restless nnder the heaviness of musk and benzoin, and sigh for the unattainable insipidity of fresh air. We are regaled with dishes in which no condiment is forgotten, nor indeed anything but simply the meat; and we are ushered into chambers where the tapestry is all composed of dwarfs and giants, and the floor all covered with blood. Thomson, in the Seasons, has given us many beautiful descriptions of inanimate nature; but the moment any one speaks in them the charm is broken. The figures he introduces are fantastical. The Hassan of Collins is excellent: he however is surpassed by Burns and Scott: and Wordsworth, in his Michael, is nowise inferior to them. Among the moderns no poet, it appears to us, has written an Idyl so perfect, so pure and simple in expression, yet so rich in thought and imagery, as the Godiva of Alfred Tennyson. Wordsworth, like Thomson, is deficient in the delineation of character, even of the rustic, in which Scott and Burns are almost equal. But some beautiful Idyls might be extracted from the Excursion, which would easily split into lamina, and the residue might, with little loss, be blown away. Few are suspicious that they may be led astray and get benighted by following simplicity too far. If there are pleasant fruits growing on the ground, must we therefore cast aside, as unwholesome, those which have required the pruning-knife to correct and the ladder to reach them? Beautiful thoughts are seldom disdainful of sonorous epithets: we find them continually in the Pastorals of Theocritus: sometimes we see, coming rather obtrusively, the wanton and indelicate; but never (what poetry most abhors) the mean and abject. Widely different from our homestead poets, the Syracusan is remarkable for a facility that never draggles, for a spirit that never flags, and for a variety that never is exhausted. His reflections are frequent, but seasonable; soon over, like the shadows of spring clouds on flowery meadows, and not hanging heavily upon the scene, nor depressing the vivacity of the blythe antagonists. 1 THE POEMS OF CATULLUS. DOERING's first edition of Catullus came out nearly half a century before his last edition. When he returned to his undertaking, he found many things, he tells us, to be struck out, many to be altered and set right. We believe we shall be able to show that several are still remaining in these predicaments. They who in our days have traced the progress of poetry, have pursued it generally not as poets or philosophers, but as hasty observers or cold chronologists. If we take our stand on the Roman world, just before the subversion of its free institutions, we shall be in a position to look backward on Greece, and forward on Italy and England and we shall be little disposed to pick up and run away with the stale comments left by those who went before us; but rather to loiter a little on the way, and to indulge, perhaps too complacently, in the freshness of our own peculiar opinions and favourite speculations. The last poet who flourished at Rome, before the extinction of the republic by the arms of Julius Cæsar, was Catullus; and the last record we possess of him is about the defamatory verses which he composed on that imperishable name. Cicero, to whom he has expressed his gratitude for defending him in a law-suit, commends on this occasion the equanimity of Cæsar, who listened to the reading of them in his bath before dinner. There is no reason to believe that the poet long survived his father's guest, the Dictator: but his decease was unnoticed in those times of agitation and dismay; nor is the date of it to be ascertained. It has usually been placed at the age of fortysix, four years after Cæsar's. Nothing is more absurd than the supposition of Martial, which however is but a poetical one. Si forsan tener ausus est Catullus (It is scarcely worth a remark by the way, that si forsan is not Latin; si forte would be: si and an can have nothing to do with each other.) But allowing that Virgil had written his Ceiris and Culex, two poems inferior to several in the Eton school-exercises, he could not have published his first Eclogues in the lifetime of Catullus: and if he had, the whole of them are not worth a single Phaleucian or scazon of the vigorous and impassioned Veronese. But Virgil is not to be depreciated by us, as he too often has been of late, both in this country and abroad; nor is he at all so when we deliver our opinion that his pastorals are almost as inferior to those of Theocritus as Pope's are to his. Even in these, there not only are melodious verses, but harmonious sentences, appropriate images, and tender thoughts. Once or twice we find beauties beyond any in Theocritus: for example, Ite, capella! Non ego vos posthac viridi projectus in antro Dumosâ pendere procul de rupe videbo. Yet in other places he is quite as harsh as if he had been ever so negligent. One instance is, Nunc victi, tristes, quonium Fors omnia versat, Hos illi (quod nec bene vertat) mittimus hædos. But now we must stoop To the worst in the troop, And must do whatsoever that vagabond wills : I wish the old goat Had a horn in his throat, And the kids and ourselves were again on the hills. Supposing the first of the Eclogues to have appeared seven years after the death of Catullus, and this poet to have composed his earliest works in the lifetime of Lucretius, we can not but ponder on the change of the Latin language in so short a space of time. Lucretius was by birth a Roman, and wrote in Rome; yet who would not say unhesitatingly, that there is more of what Cicero calls urbane in the two provincials, Virgil and Catullus, than in the authoritative and stately man who leads Memmius from the camp into the gardens of Epicurus. He complains of poverty in the Latin tongue; but his complaint is only on its insufficiency in philosophical terms, which Cicero also felt twenty years later, and called in Greek auxiliaries. But in reality the language never exhibited such a profusion of richness as in the comedies of Plautus, whose style is the just admiration of the Roman orator. Cicero bears about him many little keepsakes received from this quarter, particularly the diminutives. His fondness for them borders on extravagance. Could you believe that the language contains in its whole compass a hundred of these? could you believe that an orator and philosopher was likely to employ a quarter of the number? Yet in the various works of Cicero we have counted and written down above a hundred and sixty. Catullus himself has employed them much more sparingly than Cicero, or than Plautus, and always with propriety and effect. The playful Ovid never indulges in them, nor does Propertius, nor does Tibullus. Nobody is willing to suspect that Virgil has ever done it; but he has done it once in Oscula libavit natæ. Perhaps they had been turned into ridicule, for the misapplication of them by some forgotten poet in the commencement of the Augustan age. Quintilian might have given us information on this it lay in his road. But whether they died by a natural death or a violent one, they did not appear again as a plague until after the deluge of the Dark Ages; and then they increased and multiplied in the slime of those tepid shallows from which Italy in few places has even yet emerged. In the lines of Hadrian, Animula, vagula, blandula, they have been greatly admired, and very undeservedly. Pope has made sad work of these. Whatever they are, they did not merit such an experimentum crucis at his hands. In Catullus no reader of a poetical mind would desire one diminutive less. In Politian and such people they buzz about our ears insufferably; and we would waft every one of them away, with little heed or concern if we brush off together with them all the squashy insipidities they alight on. The imitators of Catullus have indeed been peculiarly unsuccessful. Numerous as they are, scarcely five pieces worth remembrance can be found among them. There are persons who have a knowledge of latinity, there are others who have a knowledge of poetry, but it is not always that the same judge decides with equal wisdom in both courts. Some hendecasyllabics of the late Serjeant Lens, an excellent man, a first-rate scholar, and a graceful poet, have been rather unduly praised; to us they appear monotonous and redundant. We will transcribe only the first two for particular notice and illustration. Grates insidiis tuis dolisque Vinclis jam refero lubens solutis. Never were words more perplext and involved. He who brings them forward as classical, is unaware that they are closely copied from a beautiful little poem of Metastasio, which J. J. Rousseau has translated admirably. Grazie agli inganni tuoi Alfin respiro, O Nice! How much better is the single word inganni than the useless and improper insidiis, which renders dolis quite unnecessary. A better line would be Or, Vincla projicio libens soluta. Tandem projicio soluta vincla. The In fact, it would be a very difficult matter to suggest a worse. most-part of the verses may be transposed in any way whatsoever: each seems to be independent of the rest: they are good, upright, sound verses enough, but never a sentence of them conciliates the ear. The same objection is justly made to nearly all the modern hendecasyllabics. Serjeant Lens has also given us too many lines for one Phaleucian piece the metre will admit but few advantageously it is the very best for short poems. This might be broken into three or four, and almost in any place indifferently. Like the seta equina, by pushing out a head and a tail, each would go on as well as ever. In how few authors of hendecasyllabics is there one fine cadence! Such, for instance, as those in Catullus : And those, Soles occidere et redire possunt, Nobis quum semel occidit brevis lux Quamvis candida millies puella Ambas injiciens roget morari. |