have uttered without hesitation, cannot be translated without the violation of all decency into modern tongues. The explication of this circumstance would lead us too far; it is not enough to say that our improved state of morals will adequately account for it. There is no necessary connexion between a refined and fastidious delicacy of language, and an unblemished purity of public morals. It may, however, put us into better humour with the plain speaking of the ancients, if we refer ourselves to that law or principle in all languages, concerning which we have already said so much; namely, the independence of words upon the exact pictures or images of the things for which they nominally stand. Will not this half absolve them from the hasty reproaches with which we are apt to visit them upon every supposed violation of decorum ? Try many of the most offensive words, in ancient authors, by this text. In strictness, they are conjoined with foul and loathsome images; but this law of language interposes and separates the word from the image. The word, at least, whether from some secret melody, or from whatever charm, was retained in use long after it had ceased to conjure up the impure image, and thus became, in alliance with others, symbols of certain passions, sentiments, and emotions of the higher kind. Now, if this word be translated, that is, replaced by another belonging to another dialect, it is ten to one against our getting a particle of the sentiment or passion which dictated its original use; but we shall be sure of the unmixed impurity of the image, which, in its primitive application, it was intended to convey:

We will explain ourselves shortly by referring to the very poet who is now under our consideration. Catullus, in verses which breathe his loftiest, and, we might say, his most virtuous disdain of the abandoned profligates of his day, uses words which elude all literal translation, but which, it abundantly appears, from the sense and context of the

passages where they occur, were words which had lost their primitive pollution, by having ceased to be conjoined with the matter or image for which they stood. It will be unnecessary to dwell upon this topic. Every classical scholar will immediately apprehend us, although we are prohibited from minuter explanations. The Hendecasyllables to Aurelius and Furius, and those to Cæsar upon Mamurra, will be sufficient keys to our meaning. We do not contend for the absolute purity of the Latin poet; but we deem it no more than common equity to extend to him the privileges of his country and his language, while we are fully prepared to admit that, when he has had the full benefit of this mitigatory plea, there will remain much offence against modesty and decorum, that must for ever rise up in judgment against him.

Be this as it may, it is certainly not the least of the difficulties of translating him, inasmuch as it alike involves the translator in a conflict with his own language, and that from which he translates. But there is also another peculiarity, though of a widely different quality, in Catullus, which augments still more the peril and perplexity of his translator ;-it is that characteristic which has hardly a name but in one language ;—pedeia, perhaps the classic would call it; that ineffable grace, that unaffected and negligent beauty, which, seeming to be art, no art can imitate; breathing, as it were the unperfumed sweetness of nature, yet smelling of nothing, and least of all of the lamp. His

melodies, like those breathed at random by the passing winds upon the harp of Eolus, surpass all the artifice of studied modulation. Add to this that curious felicity applied by Petronius to Horace, but which is still more emphatically the property of Catullus.

Nor is this all. He has another quality which requires, in his translator, an ear more metrically attuned than is usual with those critics or commentators by whom he has been heretofore illustrated. What we mean is this: many of his sweetest but simplest effusions, such, for instance, as the Acme and Septimius, that beginning Varus me meus ad suos amores, though framed in that easy and delightful measure of which he is, beyond all competition, the most powerful master, and many others, which we forbear to enumerate, dissemble, as it were, their lyrical texture, and assume the appearance of a simple continuous discourse rather than that of pieces fettered with metrical rules, and broken by metrical divisions. We think that this quality has been unperceived, at least, it has been unnoticed by his critics. It is not, however, peculiar to Catullus only; Dionysius, of Halicarnassus,* has pointed out the same property in the exquisite verses attributed to Simonides, where the poet represents Danäe exposed with her infant Perseus to the winds and the ocean.

"You will not perceive in this poem," observes that sagacious critic, "its lyrical measure, nor discern in it any characteristic of the strophe, or the antistrophe, or the epode; but it will appear to you a mere discourse, divided only by the natural order of its sentences." Many of the odes of Horace are remarkable for the same quality. Some of his Alcaic verses may be read, notwithstanding the frequent recurrence of the strophes, without exciting any suspicion of their metrical character; yet they are not the less metrical. Now, to translate such pieces into a language that has no metre, strictly speaking, must be a task of such difficulty, that it would be scarcely possible to find, amongst our Trissotins, any one sufficiently fool-hardy to attempt it. In all probability it was this intractable quality in Catullus, with a lurking persuasion, perhaps, of the insignificance of French verse, that suggested to Pezay and Noel, his French translators, the idea which they have successively executed of a prose translation. Neither of them, indeed, assigned the reason which we have thus ventured to state: they might have felt the difficulty though unable to account for it. The same difficulty seems to have been present to La Harpe, a critic, whose learning we more than suspect, and upon whose authority we would not implicitly rely; yet he is far from being wrong when, speaking of the smaller compositions of Catullus, he observes, "Ce sont de petits chef-d'œuvres, ou il n'y a pas un mot qui ne soit precieux, mais qu'il est aussi impossible d'analyser que de traduire." Perhaps these remarks do not apply with equal force to those higher specimens which are to be found in Catullus,-those which, like the Atys and Berecynthia, or the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, exhibit much of the stateliness and grandeur of the epic muse. These appear to us infinitely more susceptible of translation. And here, whilst we

* Περι συνθέσεως ονομάτων, δ. 26.

have been led to advert to this higher character of his poetry, we are reluctantly reminded of the unjust measure which has been meted to this elegant poet, by a race of critics and commentators who have successively echoed each other in their several estimates of a writer with whom they are only half acquainted. He has, in fact, been considered like Anacreon, as the minstrel only of wine and pleasure, whereas, it is on one occasion only,-his verses to his cup-bearer,--that he betrays any fondness for the juice of the grape; and even then it was in subservience to the tastes of a lady for whom he seemed solicitous to broach his oldest cask.

Inger mî calices amariores

Ut les Posthumiæ jubet magistrz. But it is astonishing how this character of Catullus has been bandied from one to another, and received by each with the most indolent acquiescence. His verses respire only love and revelry, says one. Another says that they are “echappés au delire de l'orgie ou de l'amour.”_Catullus, however, belongs to another classification. Love, indeed, of an ardent and too licentious a description, appears in many of his verses. But the poet whom Virgil did not disdain to copy, whom Ovid, and even the philosophic Perseus have plundered, belongs to a higher order.-" That strain I heard was of a higher mood.” Atys, if no other monument of his greater powers had been extant,-Atys surely would be of itself sufficient to vindicate his place among the first of that sacred band. To say that it places him upon a level with Virgil, were feeble praise. The poet of the Æneid confined himself within the circle of those established beauties and recognised graces, from which the severity of his taste taught him that it would be impious to depart: whereas Catullus, in this short poem, has soared with an unrestrained daring, far beyond the regular and licensed proprieties which fetter other poets. The metre is as wild and grotesque aś the subject: it is swiftly impetuous in its numbers: in one word, it is a poem which breathes the warmest inspiration of genius, wholly unfettered, indeed, by the rules of art, but never offending against the principles of taste. Nothing was ever more happily executed, -nothing more boldly conceived, than the change of sex so instantaneously effected by the use of the feminine inflection ;-a transition which the idiom of our own language renders impracticable.* The address of Atys, in the momentary calm of her exhausted frenzy, to her native shores,-those shores which her strained eyeballs sketched amidst the obscure mists of the ocean, is unequalled for its pathos. That which comes nearest to it in point of feeling, is the exquisite apostrophe of Alcestis to her nuptial couch in the beautiful tragedy of Euripides. They can best feel and best appreciate the tenderness of the passage, who have been severed widely from their native country, the country of their charities and affections, and have solaced themselves by imagining, amidst the misty solitudes of the waters, the beloved spot which the heart pants to revisit. Who is there that will not hesitate

• We were surprised to find it neglected by one of the Italian translators of Catullus, as it might easily have been adopted in that language.

Co' membri allor veggendosi mozzi, e non più virili,
E sangue al suol versandone, simul divenne a femina
E pigliò, &c.

Catullo. Tradotto da Luigi Subleyras. Rome, 1770.

to allow the interrogatory of Atys to be the unadulterated eloquence of nature?

Ubinam aut quibus locis te positam, patria, rear?

It is upon these grounds that we are desirous of establishing the claim of Catullus to a much higher department in the poetical art, than that which the tasteless, the indolent, and superficial, have hitherto assigned him. There is, however, another class of his compositions in which he displays a rare and unrivalled excellence. He is emphatically the poet of friendship. "This is a strain," Mr. Lamb justly observes, "in which only a genius originally pure, however polluted by the immorality of its æra, could descant with appropriate sentiment, which speaks with all the kindly warmth of love, while it refrains from its unreasoning rage,—that adopts all its delicacy without any tinge of its grossness.

But while we have been thus detained by the charms of Catullus, we have been unmindful of our duty to Mr. Lamb. It is time, therefore, to consider the merits of his translation, and to enable our readers, by a few specimens, to form their own estimate of its execution. Having, however, already enumerated some of the difficulties inseparable from the translation of such an author, candour, and even justice requires that the work should be examined with an indulgent reference to those difficulties. To have surmounted them in some instances, and to have eluded them with great skill in others, is no slight praise, and we willingly award it to Mr. Lamb. But that he has effectively translated this hitherto untranslated poet, would be an unconscientious concession. In many respects he is superior to the translator of 1794; but he frequently falls below him in those qualities of terseness and simplicity which are indispensable in a translation of Catullus. So reluctant and coy, as it were, are these beauties to the touch of an English versifier, that it is only in a small proportion of the shorter effusions that we can compliment Mr. Lamb upon his success. We have hinted our opinion as to the greater comparative facility of imitating the more solemn or heroic pieces. In conformity with our theory, therefore, we think that he has been much more happy in the Atys, and the Peleus Thetis, than in Acme and Septimius, and the rest of those exquisite miniatures, where the slightest aberration of the pencil is fatal to the copy.

a

When in the garden's fenced and cultured ground,
Where browse no flocks, where ploughshares never wound,
By sunbeams strengthen'd, nourish'd by the shower,
And sooth'd by zephyr, blooms the lovely flower:
Maids long to place it in their modest zone,
And youths enraptured wish it for their own.
But, from the stem once pluck'd, in dust it lies,
Nor youth nor maid will then desire or prize.
The virgin thus her blushing beauty rears,
Loved by her kindred and her young compeers;
But, if her simple charm, her maiden grace
Is sullied by one spoiler's rude embrace,
Adoring youths no more her steps attend,
Nor loving maidens greet the maiden friend.
Oh Hymen, hear! Oh sacred Hymen, haste;
Come, god and guardian of the fond and chaste!

(Vol. II. p. 7, 8.) There is a melancholy tameness in Mr. Lamb's version of the beautiful lines of Catullus on his brother's grave. The condensed sentiment of the original is lost and enfeebled by expansion.

We may justly praise the style in which Mr. Lamb has rendered the other beautiful piece, in which the poet commemorates his deceased brother. We mean that addressed to his friend Hortalus with the hair of Berenice, translated from Callimachus.

Though grief, my Hortalus, that wastes my heart,

Forbids the culture of the learned Nine;
Nor can the Muses with their sweetest art

Inspire a bosom worn with grief like mine ;
For Lethe laves my brother's clay-cold foot,

His spirit lingers o'er its lazy wave;
The Trojan earth at high Rhetæum's root

O'erwhelms his relics in a distant grave!
Shall I then never, in no future year,

Oh brother, dearer far than vital breath!
See thee again? yet will I hold thee dear,

And in sad strains for ever mourn thy death.
Such as the Daulian bird so sadly pours;

As, in some gloomy grove, whose branches crost
Inweave their shade, she still at night deplores

The hapless destinies of Itys lost.
Yet not forgetting thy request, my friend,

My love awhile can anguish disregard ;
And, though opprest by heaviest wo, I send

These lines, the chosen of Cyrene's bard.
Lest, vainly borne upon the zephyrs swift,

Thou deem'st thy wishes fled my thought and care;
As the dear apple, love's clandestine gift,

Falls from the bosom of the virgin fair ;
Which she forgetting in her vest conceald,

Springs her returning mother's kiss to claim,
It falls, and as it rolls to view reveal’d,
Her blushes own, like me, neglect and shame.

(Vol. II. p. 49, 50.) The following lines, being part of the complaint of Ariadne from the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, are a favourable specimen of Mr. Lamb's powers in rhyme.

“ And hast thou, Theseus, on this desart strand
Left her, who fled for thee my native land ;

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