Another group of Latin versifiers, with Bembo at their head, cultivated the elegy, the idyll, and the ode. The authors of their predilection were Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus. Abandoning the attempt to mould Christian or modern material into classic form, they frankly selected Pagan motives, and adhered in spirit as well as style to their models. Two elegiac poems of Bembo's, the 'Priapus' and the 'Faunus ad Nympeum Flumen,' may be cited as flagrant specimens of sixteenth-century licentiousness.[457] Polished language and almost faultless versification are wasted upon themes of rank obscenity. The 'Priapus,' translated and amplified in Italian _ottava rima_, gained a popular celebrity beyond the learned circles for whom it was originally written. We may trace its influence in many infamous Capitoli of the burlesque poets. Bembo excelled in elegiac verse. In a poem entitled 'De Amicâ a Viro Servatâ,' he treated a characteristically Italian subject with something of Ovid's graceful humour.[458] A lover complains of living near his mistress, closely watched by her jealous husband. Here, as elsewhere, the morality is less to be admired than the versification; and that the latter, in spite of Bembo's scrupulous attention to metre, is not perfect, may be gathered from this line:-- Tunc quos nunc habeo et quos sum olim habiturus amicos. [Footnote 457: _Carmina Quinque Illustrium Poetarum_, pp. 4 and 9-11.] [Footnote 458: _Ib._ pp. 18-23.] After reading hexameters so constructed we are tempted to shut the book with a groan, wondering how it was that a Pope's secretary and a prince of the Church should have thought it worth his while to compose a poem so injurious to his reputation as a moralist, or to preserve in it a verse so little favourable to his fame as a Latinist. More beautiful, because more true to classic inspiration, is the elegy of 'Galatea.'[459] The idyllic incidents suggest a series of pretty pictures for bas-reliefs or decorative frescoes in the manner of Albano. Bembo's masterpiece, however, in the elegiac metre, is a poem with 'De Galeso et Maximo' for its title.[460] It was composed, as the epigraph informs us, at the command of a great man at Rome; but whether that great man was also the greatest in Rome, and whether Maximus was another name for Leo, is matter of conjecture. The boy Galesus had wronged Maximus, his master. When reproved, he offered no excuses, called no witnesses, uttered no prayers to Heaven, indulged in no asseverations of innocence, shed no tears:-- Nil horum aggreditur; sed tantum ingrata loquentis Implicitus collo dulce pependit onus. Nec mora, cunctanti roseis tot pressa labellis Oscula coelitibus invidiosa dedit, Arida quot levibus florescit messis aristis, Excita quot vernis floribus halat humus. Maxime, quid dubitas? Si te piget, ipse tuo me Pone loco: hæc dubitem non ego ferre mala.[461]