Catullus wasted alike his love and the finest lyrics of which the Latin boasts. The coquettish beauty at first gloried in her conquest of Rome’s most popular poet, and appears for a time to have been true. Then she grew cold, and cast him off for new admirers. But Catullus, though outraged by her fickleness, could not overcome his unworthy passion:— “I curse her every hour sincerely, Yet hang me—but I love her dearly.” At last, however, he renounced his faithless mistress, bidding her adieu in an ode which closes with one of his most beautiful similes:— “Nor give that love a thought which I So nursed for thee in days gone by, Now by thy guile slain in an hour, E’en as some little wilding flower, That on the meadow’s border blushed, Is by the passing ploughshare crushed.” Catullus spent his hours of relaxation at his villa in the suburbs of the Latian town of Ti’bur, or at his favorite Sirmio on a lovely lake in northern Italy, the subject of one of his most graceful odes. Toward the close of his life, in the hope of refilling a purse which his extravagance had depleted, he went to Bithynia in Asia Minor as a staff-officer of the prætor Memmius, to whom Lucretius inscribed his poem. But in consequence of the selfishness of his superior, Catullus came back with wallet still lighter. Of two friends who went to Spain on a similar errand, he archly inquired:— “And have you netted—worse than worst— A good deal less than you disbursed; Like me, who following about My prætor, was—in fact—cleaned out?” The death of a brother to whom he was devotedly attached plunged Catullus in grief; and now with nothing to live for, sated with worldly pleasure, in which he found the vanity of vanities, he longed for the fate that soon overtook him. THE STYLE OF CATULLUS, called by the ancients “the Accomplished,” is lively, graceful, and vigorous; he writes in the language of nature, and excels in suiting his words to the sentiments expressed. The musical measures of the Greeks, adapted by him to his native tongue, lent intensity to his words, and there were “lutes in his very lines.” From the Greek writers, particularly Sappho and Callimachus of Alexandria, he borrowed largely. One of his odes to Lesbia is evidently an imitation of Sappho’s celebrated love-song quoted on p. 169:— TO LESBIA. “The equal of a God he seems to me, Surpassing wealth doth his blessed lot appear, Who, sitting often opposite to thee, May gaze and hear. The radiance of thy smile from me hath reft, From miserable me, all sense away, For when I look on Lesbia naught is left That Love can say. My tongue is dumb, while through each trembling limb The thin flame mounts, till self-wrought murmurs rise To fill mine ears, and night grown doubly dim Veils o’er mine eyes.”—C. N. GREGORY.