Poems of Catalina. Selected and edited by H. V. Macnaghten
and A. B. Ramsay. (Duckworth and Co. 2s. 6d.)—The Story of Cataus. By H. V. Macnaghten. (Same publishers. 2s. 6c1.) —We have no fault to find with the exegetical portion of Messrs. Macnaghten and Ramsay's edition. They understand their author—that, of course, we expect from scholars of repute—and they know where to give help, a knowledge presumably acquired by experience in teaching. We cannot but think that they would have done well to rearrange the poems. The order now followed is indeed ancient, but can hardly be the author's. It is based simply on metrical considerations, the lyric poems coming first, the hexameter and elegiac second, with the latter being reckoned the galliambic " Atys." The Life, for which Mr. Macnaghten is alone responsible, deserves much praise for the translations which it includes. They are remarkably close to the original, but the movement of the language and the metre is not hampered by this fidelity. Here is one which it would not be easy to better :— " /Ay pearl of mimic isles and Island eyes, That In the liquid lakes or wild waste seas Neptune upholds the god of those and these, My Sirmio is it true, the glad surprise;
A I
And have left Bithynia's plains behind.
And Thynia left to see you and be safe ?
Joy beyond Joy to loose the cares that chafe And lay aside the burden of the mind I Home, home is ours, the weary wanderings o'er.
The bed we longed for ours, and rest once more.
Rich recompense alone for all we bore I Joy, fairy Sirmlo, for your master's sake : Joy, waters of my own true Lydian lake : Home-laughter of the depths awake, awake I"
It is, we think, a pity that Mr. Macnaghten champions Catallus in the matter of his passion for Clodia. "He lived and died unconscious of his guilt." That is past believing. A Roman never deceived himself in this matter. The family was the foundation of the State, and he knew perfectly well that adultery destroyed it. There are matters which might have been more profitably treated ; e.g., the poet's feeling for Nature. But we have a serious quarrel with the editors of the poems in respect of the selection of the poems. "There is, at present," they say in their preface, "only one school edition of Catullus," and in this, they go on to tell us, "several poems or parts of poems have been, in our judgment, unnecessarily omitted." The fact is that the first issue of this particular "school edition" was recalled by the publishers, and a revised selection published in deference to the opinion of "the highest educational authorities," as the editor says in his preface to the revision. What he then omitted Messrs. Macnaghten and Ramsay have restored. We do not wish to go at length into this unsavoury subject, but we may give as an instance xi. 17-20. We do not care to print the stanza.
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