are chiefly employed in the indulgence and commemoration of these various passions. They are now given to us without any order or attempt at arrangement: They were distributed, indeed, by Petrus Crinitus, into three classes, lyric, elegiac, and epigrammatic,—a division which has been adopted in a few of the earlier editions; but there is no such separation in the best MSS., nor is it probable that they were originally thus classed by the author, as he calls his book _Libellum Singularem_; and they cannot now be conveniently reduced under these heads, since several poems, as the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, are written in hexameter measure. To others, which may be termed occasional poems expressing to his friends a simple idea, or relating the occurrences of the day, in iambic or phalangian verse, it would be difficult to assign any place in a systematic arrangement. Under what class, for instance, could we bring the poem giving a detail of his visit to the house of the courtezan, and the conversation which passed there concerning Bithynia? The order, therefore, in which the poems have been arbitrarily placed by the latest editors and commentators, however immethodical, is the only one which can be followed, in giving an account of the miscellaneous productions of Catullus. 1. Is a modest and not inelegant dedication, by the poet, of the whole volume, to Cornelius Nepos, whom he compliments on having written a general history, in three books, an undertaking which had not previously been attempted by any Roman— —— “Ausus es unus Italorum Omne ævum tribus explicare chartis.” 2. _Ad Passerem Lesbiæ_. This address of Catullus to the favourite sparrow of his mistress, Lesbia, is well known, and, has been always celebrated as a model of grace and elegance. Politian(468), Turnebus, and others, have discovered in this little poem an allegorical signification, which idea has been founded on a line in an epigram of Martial, _Ad Romam et Dindymum_— “Quæ si tot fuerint, quot ille dixit, _Donabo tibi passerem Catulli_(469).” That by the _passer Catulli_, however, Martial meant nothing more than an agreeable little epigram, in the style of Catullus, which he would address to Dindymus as his reward, is evident from another epigram, where it is obviously used in this sense— “Sic forsan tener ausus est Catullus Magno mittere passerem Maroni(470).” and also from that in which he compares a favourite whelp of Publius to the sparrow of Lesbia(471). That a real and _feathered_ sparrow was in the view of Catullus, is also evinced by the following ode, in which he laments the death of this favourite of his mistress. The erroneous notion taken up by Politian, has been happily enough ridiculed by Sannazzarius, in an epigram entitled _Ad Pulicianum_— “At nescio quis Pulicianus,” &c.