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Catullus copies the Greek rhythm in its details without asking whether these are in accordance with the genius of the Latin language. Horace, by adopting stricter rules, produces a much more harmonious effect. The same is true of Catullus's treatment of the elegiac, as compared with that of Propertius or Ovid.
And yet there is no good judgment that will condemn this in the ancients, and that does not incomparably more admire the equal polish, and that perpetual sweetness and flourishing beauty of Catullus's epigrams, than all the stings with which Martial arms the tails of his.
I confess I was thankful to hear a literary man and a friend praise you for not being cosmopolitan. I am not afraid now of your going over to the Greeks. But are you in danger of losing Verona in Rome?" The gathering dusk, the day's pure happiness, the sense of impending separation opened Catullus's heart. "Do you mean Clodia?" he asked straightforwardly. "Did Cicero talk of her too?"
A smile, both bitter and wistful, came upon Catullus's lips as he remembered a letter he had had yesterday from Lucretius, bidding him listen to the voice of Nature who would bring him peace. "What is so bitter," his friend had urged, "if it comes in the end to sleep?
During a Continental tour Tennyson visited Catullus's Sirmio: "here he made his Frater Ave atque Vale," and the poet composed his beautiful salutation to the "Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago." In 1880 Ballads and other Poems proved that, like Titian, the great poet was not to be defeated by the years. The First Quarrel was in his most popular English style.
Another licence, still more alien from Roman usage, is the retention of a short or unelided syllable at the end of the first penthemimer. Catullus's elegiac belongs to the class of half-adapted importations, beautiful in its way, but rather because it recalls the exquisite cadences of the Greek than as being in itself a finished artistic product. The six long poems are of unequal merit.
I remembered Catullus's lines. Desine de quoquam quicquam bene velle mereri, Aut aliquem fieri posse putare pium. Omnia sunt ingrata: nihil fecisse benigne est: Immo, etiam taedet, taedet obestque magis; Ut mihi, quem nemo gravius nec acerbius urget, Quam modo qui me unum atque unicum amicum habuit.
I send you one specimen of my translation, to ask whether so many as seven lines together the same is too monotonous. If there were only four or five it would be as one of Catullus's. I dare say you have the original.... "With truest regards to you all, "Your cordial friend, "F. W. Newman." Pulszky, the friend of Kossuth and also of Francis Newman, was a Hungarian author, politician, and patriot.
Everybody knows Catullus's contribution, which begins: "A log of oak, some rustic's blade Hewed out my shape; grotesquely made I guard this spot by night and day, Scare every vagrant knave away, And save from theft and rapine's hand My humble master's cot and land." The chief complaint to be made against the writers of these verses is that they so rarely strayed from their subject.
Catullus's epigrams are entitled to little praise, with regard either to sentiment or point; and on the whole, his merit, as a poet, appears to have been magnified beyond its real extent. He is said to have died about the thirtieth year of his age.
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