Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/35

Rh he piles up an addition sum that takes away the breath, and eventually gives a reason for

The ancients had a motive for letting their kisses pass counting, which does not appear in the love-ditties of our Herricks and Drummonds, though both betray the influence of Catullus—the deprecation, to wit, of magic, mischance, ill-luck, or an evil-eye, which their superstition considered unascertained numbers to secure. Exemption from such, then, was a stimulus to the lover's appetite for kisses, as is pleaded again by the poet "To Lesbia Kind" in C. vii., where he exhausts the round of similes for numbers numberless—the sea-sands, the stars of night, and so forth—and doubts whether the very largest definite number

could satisfy his thirst and fever. One could wish that to the Lesbian series might be linked a short poem in kindred vein (C. xlviii.) which may well sum up the poet's dicta upon the subject, inscribed "To a Beauty"—