Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/46

34 scandal, the piquancy of which belonged to the hour. One (C. lxxxii.) is a poetic appeal to a friend, if he values his friendship, to abstain from rivalling him in his love—a style of appeal to which the poet has recourse again and again at an after-date; and the two most considerable are a dialogue between Catullus and a door, which has no good to tell of its mistress; and a more presentable though still ambiguous skit on a stupid husband, who was clearly a fellow-townsman of the poet's, and had made himself a butt by wedding a young wife. The point of this poem consists in the colony addressed (which we take to be Verona) having had a rickety old bridge, of which the citizens were ashamed. The poet takes occasion to make poetical capital at the same time out of the popular longing for a better structure, and the ridicule attaching to an ill-assorted union. He bargains for a new bridge being inaugurated, by the precipitation of the "old log" from the creaky arches of a structure like himself. It appears that this bridge had been the scene of all the country town's fêtes and galas; and its inadequacy for such work is amusingly compared with the ill-matching of December and May, which is illustrated hard by it. A stave of the version by Professor Badham of Sydney will furnish so much of a taste of this poem as the reader will care to read:—