Page:The poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus - Francis Warre Cornish.djvu/37



bog and stinking marsh. The fellow is a perfect blockhead, and has not as much sense as a little baby of two years old sleeping in the rocking arms of his father. Now whereas he has for a wife a girl in the freshest flower of youth, — a girl too, more exquisite than a tender kidling, one who ought to be guarded more diligently than ripest grapes, — he lets her play as she will, and does not care one straw, and for his part does not stir himself, but lies like an alder in a ditch hamstrung by a Ligurian axe, with just as much perception of everything as if it did not exist anywhere at all. Like this, my booby sees nothing, hears nothing; what he himself is, whether he is or is not, he does not know so much as this. He it is whom I want now to send head foremost from your bridge, to try whether he can all in a moment wake up his stupid lethargy, and leave his mind sprawling there on its back in the nasty sludge, as a mule leaves her iron shoe in the sticky mire.

That Suffenus, Varus, whom you know very well, is a charming fellow, and has wit and good manners. He also makes many more verses than anyone else. I suppose he has got some ten thousand or even more written out in full, and not, as is often done, put down on old scraps; imperial paper, new rolls, new bosses, red ties, parchment wrappers; all ruled with lead and smoothed with pumice. When you come to read these, the fashionable wellbred Suffenus I spoke of seems to be nothing but any goatherd or ditcher, when we look at him again; so >° absurd and changed he is. How are we to account for this? The same man who was just now a dinner-