In addition to the tragedies and epics which noblemen threw off as an elegant pastime for their superfluous leisure hours, love-poetry, pasquinades, and _vers de société_ travelled merrily from salon to salon. If Lucretius carries the heaviest metal of Latin poets, Catullus has by far the lightest touch. He writes with an ease which makes Horace seem laboured, and with a simplicity which makes Propertius and even Ovid look like pedants, though Catullus himself, like all Romans, thought fit occasionally to adopt the classical pose, and fill his verses with learned allusions. If it were not for the influence of the schoolroom, to which most of Catullus’s work is for the best of reasons unknown, he would be recognised as possessing far more of the vital spark of poetry than Horace. Roman culture, being mainly second-hand, is almost entirely lacking in the quality of fresh youth which we enjoy in such writers as Chaucer and the early Elizabethan singers. Catullus, therefore, the earliest important lyric poet of Rome, is by no means unsophisticated. On the contrary, he is a clever son of the _forum_--a boulevardier, one might say--with a pretty but savage wit in reviling democrats like Cæsar and Mamurra. But, with his truly Italian scurrility, he combines the quintessence of Italian charm. When the inspiration takes him he is simple, direct, and natural. Indeed, the shorter poems of Catullus seem to me to reveal more of the [Illustration] essential Roman than all the rest of Roman literature put together. We have the innocent pleading of the April lover in: soles occidere et redire possunt: nobis cum semel occidit breuis lux nox est perpetua una dormienda. da mi basia mille, deinde centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum, deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.[24] and the awful simplicity of his wrath at betrayal: Cæli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa, illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam plus quam se atque suos amavit omnes, nunc in quadriuiis et angiportis glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes. We have a more genuine-sounding love of nature in his praises of Sirmio, and a more natural pathos in the famous lament for his brother, than any other Latin poet can give us. In one species of composition, the _Epithalamium_, he is supreme. For example: flere desine, non tibi Au- runculeia, periculum est nequa femina pulchrior clarum ab Oceano diem uiderit uenientem. talis in uario solet diuitis domini hortulo stare flos hyacinthinus. sed moraris, abit dies: prodeas, noua nupta. prodeas, noua nupta, si iam uidetur, et audias nostra uerba. uiden? faces aureas quatiunt comas: prodeas noua nupta.[25]