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Updated: June 17, 2025
I was besides encumbered by my duties to Sir William, whom it fell upon me to entertain; for my lord was quite sunk into a state bordering on PERVIGILIUM, watching the woods with a rapt eye, sleeping scarce at all, and speaking sometimes not twenty words in a whole day. That which he said was still coherent; but it turned almost invariably upon the party for whom he kept his crazy lookout.
The Pervigilium Mercurii of Georgius Loysius, a friend of Scaliger, was never translated into English, but the important virtues of a traveller therein described had their influence on English readers. Loysius compiled two hundred short petty maxims, illustrated by apt classical quotations, bearing on the correct behaviour and duties of a traveller.
Perhaps the much-disputed poem called Pervigilium Veneris belongs to this epoch. It is printed in Weber's Corpus Poetarum, and is well worth reading from the melancholy despondency that breathes through its quiet inspiration.
It is interesting to note how the rising tide of romanticism has here, as elsewhere, left Claudian wholly untouched. The passage, though elaborately ornate, is executed in the clear hard manner of the Alexandrian school; it has not a trace of that sensitiveness to nature which vibrates in the Pervigilium Veneris.
He bestows just praise upon "The Rise of Woman," "The Fairy Tale," and "The Pervigilium Veneris;" but has very properly remarked that in "The Battle of Mice and Frogs" the Greek names have not in English their original effect. Another poem, "When Spring Comes On," is, he says, taken from the French.
Allen is remembering Theocritus, the Pervigilium Veneris, and the silver ages of literature no less than his own state and his own day. He uses local color habitually to ennoble it, and but for his extravagant taste for sweetness he might have achieved pastorals of an imperishable sort.
We have never known any one who fell in, at the first trial, with the proper rhyme and cadence of the pervigilium Veneris, or the choral lyrics of the Greek dramatists.
In the Pervigilium Veneris with its elaborate simplicity partly a conscious literary artifice, partly a real reversion to the childhood of poetical form this process is, as it were, laid bare before our eyes; the ringing phrases turn and return, and expand and interlace and fold in, as though set in motion by a strain of music.
The Pervigilium Veneris is written in the trochaic septenarian verse which had been freely used by the earliest Roman poets, but had since almost dropped out of literary use. With the revival of the trochaic movement the long divorce between metrical stress and spoken accent begins to break down.
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