Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/30

18 decency, which is wont to be retained later than most other characteristics by the well-born.

The remains of Catullus would be deprived of three parts of their interest, had the Lesbian odes and ditties been unfortunately lost. Not only, however, is this not the case, inasmuch as, of many extant, she is the distinct burden: but many poems, not professedly addressed to her, are really referable to her inspiration. Accordingly, it is a part of the rôle of every critic of Catullus to arrange, according to his skill in divination or conjecture, the sequence of the poems of the Lesbian series; and that which it has been thought most convenient to follow in these pages is the plausible and clear arrangement of Theodore Martin, the most congenial and appreciative of the poet's English translators. It is a happy and shrewd instinct which places first in the series that model translation from Sappho's Greek fragment, which seems at once a naming-day ode and a declaration of passion, fenced and shielded under the guise of being an imitative song. The poet, in the fervour of his new-kindled devotion, in the flutter of hope and yearning, and not yet in the happiness of even short-lived assurance, pours forth a wonderful representation of one of the most passionate of Greek love-songs; and therein (if we strike out an alien stanza, which reads quite out of place, and must have been inserted, in dark days, by some blundering botcher or wrong-headed moralist) transfers from the isles of Greece burning words which have suffered nothing in