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The St. James's Magazine

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Mrs. S. C. Hall

The St. James's Magazine

Paperback (General Books LLC Feb. 4, 2012)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1864. Excerpt: ... LOVE-SONGS OF HORACE AND CATULLUS. While the writings of Horace are in use at every English grammar school and university, and are consequently known to every advanced schoolboy, the "Lepidum Novum Libellum" of Catullus is familiar only to those who read poetry for pure purposes of pleasure. The odes and epodes of the former have been translated, dissected, commented upon by almost every English scholar; but there is no extant edition of Catullus with English notes. The reasons of this are obvious. Chief among them is the fact that Horace loses very little when bereft of his impure passages, while an expurgated Catullus would be a caput mortuum. Yet the reader of Latin poetry can scarcely think of the gifted freedman without remembering his patrician predecessor. Horace's boast that he was the first to enrich the Roman literature with translations from the Greek lyric poets,--"Qui sibi fidit Dux regit examon. Parios ego primus iambos Ostendi Latio, numeros animosque secutus Archilochi, non res et agentia verba Lycamben,"--is nullified by the fact that he had been preceded by Catullus, whose works abound with Greek paraphrases, and who had translated verhatim the most delicious love-song of Sappho. Moreover, the author of the "Epithalamium" was equal to original flights of a high description, which cannot be said of his elegant successor. Be that as it may, there is between these two poets a certain similarity, a certain bond of taste, which tempts one to regard them as Castor and Pollux in the poetical firmament. This similarity is perhaps most conspicuous in their love-songs--a species of composition in which both excelled, and which, by the sweetness of its cadence and the familiarity of its images, can never fail to afford delight to the parched litera...
ISBN
1155127706 / 9781155127705
Pages
246
Weight
15.7 oz.
Dimensions
7.44 x 0.52 in.

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