Page:Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography Volume 1.pdf/999

CAT in the carmen have provoked more imitations than any other in the range of Latin poetry. The hexameters in the Peleus and Thetis have a greater majesty and flow than is to be found in the verses of the Augustan age. The picture of Ariadne's solitude, and the description of "Bacchus and his crew," are in the highest degree dramatic; in richness of colouring they are equal to the best passages of Keats. The "Atys," both in its tone and rhythm, bears traces of a Greek origin. It is unlike any modern production, and can hardly be appreciated in a northern country. It is properly a birth of the East, a wonderful representation of a wonderful worship. Its wild intensity seems to suit the religion of Cybele. The dithyrambs, which now hurry along with the fire of a maddening frenzy, now break into the passion of remorse, and again die away in a wail of despair, are inspired by the very spirit of the Mænad. Catullus is the most versatile of the Latin poets; he touched almost every theme of poetry, and adorned all he touched. Lucretius surpassed him in sublimity; Horace in the melody and refinement of his lyric strains; Ovid was the greater master of elegy; the epigrams of Martial have a keener sting; but Catullus was excellent in all, and only second in any of those lines of effort. He held a high place in the esteem of his contemporaries. Among his successors Ovid speaks of him as the glory of Verona, and feigns to have met his shade among the foremost of the blessed bards. Propertius declares that Lesbia has, through her Roman lover's praise, outstripped the fame of Helen herself; and Martial, in reference to the earlier poets, says, with a mixture of modesty and confidence, "uno sed tibi sim minor Catullo." The epithet doctus so frequently applied to him, may refer to his intimate acquaintance with Greek literature; but it is more likely used in the sense of callidus, to express the skill and subtilty of his own language. One of our living classics has called Catullus "the most elegant of all poets in all ages." We do not know that he belonged to any philosophical sect, but his writings are those of an Epicurean. Oppressed by a prevailing sense of the shadows that close round the sunshine of life, he seeks and finds refuge in the joys of the hour. His morality was that most prevalent in his age. . "Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die." The same strain of thought is common in the odes of Horace; it appears in the poetry of all nations from a sort of beauty in the contrast between gaiety and gloom on which it rests. "Death is the end of life; ah, why should life all labour be? "Catullus wrote in thirteen varieties of metre. His text is very corrupt. The best restoration of it is Lachmann's. Dunlop gives a fah selection of imitations of his most famous passages; but the most adequate criticism of him that has yet appeared is Lander's. There have been many versions of his poems; few of them are very successful. It requires a poet to translate a poet—a poet, a lover, and a man of fashion to translate Catullus.—J. N.  CATULUS, the name of an illustrious Roman family belonging to the gens Lutatia, which has produced a considerable number of distinguished generals and statesmen:—

, was consul along with A. Postumius Albinus in 242. He acquired great distinction in the first Punic war by defeating, near the Ægates, the Carthaginian fleet under Hanno, destroying no fewer than 120 galleys.

, consul along with Marius in 102 ., gained, in conjunction with his colleague, a signal victory over the Cimbri at Vercellæ, in the north of Italy. In the civil war he espoused the cause of Sulla, and was prescribed by Marius,. 87. Finding escape impossible, he put an end to his life by shutting himself up in a room filled with the fumes of burning charcoal. Catulus is warmly commended by Cicero for his wisdom, integrity, and eloquence. He possessed a highly cultivated mind, was well skilled in Greek literature, and was celebrated for the purity and elegance of his style.

, son of the preceding, born about 120 ., was chosen consul along with Æmilius Lepidus in 78, the year in which Sulla died. He opposed the attempt of his colleague to rescind the laws of the dictator, and afterwards, as proconsul, defeated him in two engagements, and compelled him to take refuge in Sardinia, where he perished. Catulus resisted the proposal to intrust Pompey with the command of the forces appointed to exterminate the pirates in the Mediterranean, and was equally hostile to his nomination to the command of the war against Mithridates. He died. 60, leaving behind him the reputation of an honest and courageous man.—J. T.  CAUCHE,, a French sailor, born at Rouen, who visited Madagascar in 1638, and along with several companions, spent three years on that island. They afterwards sailed to the Red Sea, where they seem to have followed piratical practices, and captured several vessels belonging to the Arabs and the people of Malabar. Cauche published in 1651 "A true and curious account of the island of Madagascar," &c., the accuracy of which has been impeached, but without just reason, by Flacourt, the governor of the French colony in Madagascar.—J. T.  CAUCHON,, bishop of Beauvais during the first half of the fifteenth century. He took an active part in the civil broils which at that period convulsed France, and after the death of Charles VI. became an active partisan of the Burgundian faction. He has been doomed to perpetual infamy by the share which he took in procuring, by the vilest arts, the condemnation of Joan of Arc. Cauchon died suddenly in 1443, twelve years after the perpetration of this crime. He was excommunicated by Calixtus IV., and his character and conduct were held in such abhorrence by the people of his diocese that his remains were dug up and cast upon the highway.—J. T.  CAUCHY,, one of the most remarkable of the more recent mathematicians of France. Born on 21st August, 1789, his family was happily of a humble though respectable station belonging to the tiers etat; and so their moderate fortunes escaped being affected by the political hurricanes which afterwards devastated France. Cauchy obtained an excellent classical education, chiefly in consequence of a counsel given his father by the great Lagrange, then facile princeps of all analysts—"Do not permit your son to open a mathematical book, or intermeddle with a solitary figure, until he shall have completed his literary studies." The most wholesome advice was followed; but Cauchy's predilection for abstract science soon manifested itself, and he left the polytechnic school, after a brilliant career, in 1807. He began his original labours in 1811, by some remarkable papers (on polyhedrons) of pure geometry; but subsequent efforts connected with abstruse points in the Modern Analysis and the Theory of Numbers, as well as his remarkable essay on the propagation of waves on the surface of a heavy fluid of profound depth (crowned by the Academy in 1816), indicated the rise of a genius whose powers and sympathies were confined to no special branch of scientific inquiry, but could encompass and enrich them all. It were useless to attempt to enumerate all Cauchy's services—much less can we reckon up the innumerable papers and memoirs which, to the end of his life, continued to flow with scarcely conceivable rapidity from his too prolific pen. It may be said in perfect truth that there is scarcely a portion of Analysis which he did not advance; less even by what he did himself than by the impulse which his remarkable ideas communicated to the thoughts and investigations of others. He brought the force of his intellect to clear up several of the obscurest and most arduous problems in physical astronomy; and to him are unquestionably owing those last perfections in the Undulating Theory of Light, which, imperfectly appreciated at the period of their publication, lay hidden amid the mass of his memoirs until the experimental researches of Jamin and other physicists of quite recent years, established by experiment the very facts that Cauchy predicted, and of which, so long before, he had divined the cause. Notwithstanding the indisputable eminence of Cauchy as a thinker, it were indeed vain to conceal that great imperfection attached to him as a writer. His earlier works, the "Course of Analysis," the "Differential Calculus," and the "Application of the Infinitesimal Calculus to the Theory of Curves," are confessedly unexceptionable either as to rigour or method; but even here one painfully discerns the rudiments of an obscurity which rapidly grew upon him—an obscurity frequently and fatally affecting the writings of men eminent in various departments of thought. In rare cases perhaps, through affectation, in others through a certain intellectual imperfection, the writers in question forget that a writer and a thinker are different; that to write means to instruct; that, in order to instruct, the condition of the mind to be instructed must be retained constantly before the writer's mind, and that unnecessary ellipses and startling enigmas, whether in algorithm or development, are not a whit more commendable than "stammering" in ordinary speech. In this respect Cauchy sinned greatly. It never occurred to him to ask whether a new idea could not be adequately and fully expressed in common symbols; with the thought, he generally threw 