TO GELLIUS. OFTEN ponder'd and debated, For you to criticise and mend ; In hopes, that so I might appease ye, Gnats will be gnats, and try to sting! So, Gellius, I no more will flatter, Nor look for any peace from you. Fall on my cloak your shafts will scatter, But mine shall pierce you through and through. NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. TO CORNELIUS NEPOS. PAGE I. HE Cornelius Nepos to whom Catullus dedicates his poems is the writer familiar to us in the volume De Viris Illustribus, over which many a schoolboy's weariest hours have been passed; a volume which bears his name, but is now universally admitted to be, with the exception of the Life of Atticus, merely an epitome by another hand of Nepos's original work. He was the author of numerous important works, none of which have come down to us; and, among others, of the Epitome of Universal History referred to by Catullus in this poem. That this Cornelius was the person selected by Catullus for the dedication of his volume, has been concluded from the following lines of a poem by Ausonius, who wrote in the fourth century, when the facts of the literary history of Catullus's time were doubtless well known: Cui dono lepidum novum libellum? With the pumice made as neat, &c. The parchments on which the manuscripts of the ancients were written were polished with pumice-stone, the better to receive the ink. When completed, the outside was subjected to the same operation, and ornamented with colour or otherwise. A highly-finished composition was said to be pumice expolitum. Catullus may perhaps use the phrase in this sense; but more probably he alluded merely to the fact, that the presentation copy of the poems was carefully got up; just as now-a-days a poet might have his volume bound by a Boissonnet, Lortic, Bedford, or Holloway. LESBIA'S SPARROW. PAGE 2. HIS little poem, charming as it is, has had a reputation at least equal to its deserts. It brings vividly before us the coquettish beauty, fanning the fire of her lover's passion, and concealing her own, as she wantons with her feathered favourite. This, we may fancy, was in the early days of their attachment. Mr. Lamb, in common with many critics, supposes that the sparrow was Lesbia's solace, when separated from Catullus, translating the whole passage thus: - For thus, when we are forced to part, Her thoughts from me she steals; Thus solaces by sportive art The soft regret, the fretful smart, Catullus would scarcely have concerned himself about the privileges which the sparrow enjoyed in his absence. But that Lesbia should toy with it whilst he was sitting by, yearning to clasp her in his arms, was provoking in the extreme, especially when he more than suspected, that this was done, rather to hide her own emotion than from any peculiar pleasure in the amusement. A lover like Catullus must have regarded such trifling as mistimed. Under this construction, the full force of the "credo" comes out : Ut solatiolum sui doloris, : Credo, ut tam gravis acquiescat ardor. The point of the reference to Atalanta's story in the concluding lines of the poem, is not very obvious. How that swift-footed lady was overcome in the race by her suitor and competitor, Hippo |