"Catullus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... articles. When hard things are said about Henry VIII., let us remember that this monarch had a few copies of his book against Luther printed on vellum. The Duke of Marlborough's library possessed twenty-five books on vellum, all printed before 1496. The chapter-house at Padua has a "Catullus" of 1472 on vellum; let Mr. Robinson Ellis think wistfully of that treasure. The notable Count M'Carthy of Toulouse had a wonderful library of books in membranis, including a book much coveted for its rarity, oddity, and the beauty ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... all men in that talent we call humour, and enjoyed it in such perfection, that I have often reflected, after a night spent with him apart from all the world, that I had had the pleasure of conversing with an intimate acquaintance of Terence and Catullus, who had all their wit and nature, heightened with humour more exquisite and delightful than any other man ever possessed.' And again in the same Preface, Steele dwelt upon 'that smiling mirth, that delicate satire and genteel raillery, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Blues[27] have deserted Sam Rogers; And I, though with cold I have nearly my death got, Must put on my breeches, and wait on the Heathcote;[28] But to-morrow, at four, we will both play the Scurra, And you'll be Catullus, the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... of trustees, half of whom couldn't tell a Greek root from a rutabaga, pons asinorum from Balaam's ass. Dr. Burleson seems to be of the opinion that a majority of the Baylorian managers were educated in a mule-pen and dismissed without a diploma—couldn't tell whether a man were construing Catullus into Sanskrit or pronouncing in Piute a panegeric on a baked pup. Were I not persona non grata I would like to witness the classroom performances of these young professors—chosen with owlish gravity by men who cannot write deer sur without the expenditure of enough nervo-muscular energy to raise ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... many translations of Catullus. One, by Sir Richard Burton, was issued by Leonard Smithers in 1894. In Bohn's Library there is a prose translation by Walter K. Kelly. Professor Robinson Ellis made a verse translation that has been widely praised. Grant Allen translated the Attis in 1892. On the whole, the ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... an intending author might safely range. The direct influence on poetry must have been exceedingly small. If we review the great poets of the Augustan and republican periods, we shall find little save certain epigrams of Catullus that could not safely have been produced in post-Augustan times. Moreover, when we turn to what is actually known of the attitude of the early emperors towards literature, the balance does not seriously incline against them. It may be said without hesitation of the four emperors ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... discrimination which was wont to characterize, at one and the same time, his essais and his omelettes. In his seclusions the Vin de Bourgogne had its allotted hour, and there were appropriate moments for the Cotes du Rhone. With him Sauterne was to Medoc what Catullus was to Homer. He would sport with a syllogism in sipping St. Peray, but unravel an argument over Clos de Vougeot, and upset a theory in a torrent of Chambertin. Well had it been if the same quick sense of propriety had attended him in the peddling propensity to which ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... resolution, promised, confirmed, swore, and covenanted amongst them all, by the pure faith they owe to the nocturnal Sanct Rogero. But O the vain enterprises of women! O the great fragility of that sex feminine! They did begin to flay the man, or peel him (as says Catullus), at that member which of all the body they loved best, to wit, the nervous and cavernous cane, and that above five thousand years ago; yet have they not of that small part alone flayed any more till this hour but the head. In mere despite whereof the Jews ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... sort of neatness belonged to Isaura, and brought to mind the well-known line of Catullus when on recrossing his threshold he invokes its welcome,—a line thus not inelegantly ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and a good deal of his Organon, besides dipping elsewhere in him; the whole of Plutarch's Lives; about half of Lucian; two or three books of Athenaeus; Plautus twice; Terence twice; Lucretius twice; Catullus; Tibullus; Propertius; Lucan; Statius; Silius Italicus; Livy; Velleius Paterculus; Sallust; Caesar; and, lastly, Cicero. I have, indeed, still a little of Cicero left; but I shall finish him in a few days. I am now deep in Aristophanes and ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... half-grotesque. We have one complete poem and a considerable portion of another; the rest are the merest fragments—now two or three lines, now two or three words, often unintelligible without their context. We have imitations and translations by Catullus and by Horace; but even Catullus has conspicuously failed to reproduce her. As Mr. Swinburne has candidly and very truly said: "No man ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... is now thy rolling head! Thy winking, reeling, drunken eyes, (As old Catullus would have said), Thy oven-mouth, that swallow'd pies— Enormous hunger—monstrous drowth! Thy pockets ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... with no less severity than they do their adversaries. With what presumptuous rigour did Rivetus the Minister treat Grotius for proposing the means of peace? Grotius, in a modest answer, humbles his pride without naming him; humorously pointing him out by that title taken from Catullus[641], Adversus quemdam opaca ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... was this dead city of stones and the sea that wrought so on his spirit. Tourgenieff was right; only the young should come here, not those who had seen with Virgil the tears of things. And then he recalled the lines of Catullus—the sad, stately plaint of the classic world, like the suppressed sob ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Waterproof's Monologue," so far above Praed, to the agony of "Rizpah," the invincible energy of "Ulysses," the languor and the fairy music of the "Lotus Eaters," the grace as of a Greek epigram which inspires the lines to Catullus and to Virgil. He is with Milton for learning, with Keats for magic and vision, with Virgil for graceful recasting of ancient golden lines, and, even in the latest volume of his long life, "we may tell from the straw," as Homer says, "what ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... in a Mist Three faces Ventimiglia Genoa Venice Eros Sorrow Sleep On an Old Roundel A Landscape by Courbet A Flower-piece by Fantin A Night-piece by Millet Marzo Pazzo Dead Love Discord Concord Mourning Aperotos Eros To Catullus Insularum Ocelle' In Sark In ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... for every form of country life was very noticeable. It belonged to that which was most deeply and sincerely poetic in the Latin genius, whence Virgil drew his sweetest strain of melancholy, and Horace his most unaffected pictures, and Catullus the tenderness of his best lines on Sirmio. No Roman surpassed the pathos with which Lucretius described the separation of a cow from her calf (ii. 352-365). The same note indeed was touched by Virgil in his ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... prison. But into your poets he can stump his way at will, and upon them he can do his pleasure. And he does it. How many men have brutalised the elegance, the grace, the winning urbanity of Horace! By how many coarse and stupid fingers has Catullus been smudged and fumbled and mauled! To turn Faust into English (in the original metres) is a fashionable occupation; there are more perversions of the Commedia than one cares to recall; there is scarce a great or even a good work of the human mind but has ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... Punch's attention to the fact that 'ARRY the Ubiquitous crops up even in the Classics, as ARRIUS, in fact, in Carmen lxxxiv. of CATULLUS. How proud 'ARRY will be to hear of his classical prototype! Our Correspondent "dropping into ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... port alone, or with one rosy little man, whose memory held precisely the same span of time; sipped his port, and told his stories, and without book before him intoned Latin, Virgil and Catullus, as if language were wine upon his lips. Only—sometimes it will come over one—what if the poet strode in? "THIS my image?" he might ask, pointing to the chubby man, whose brain is, after all, Virgil's representative among us, though the body gluttonize, and as for arms, bees, or even ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... authors, Plutarch only is used, and he evidently by means of a Latin translation. But from the Latin large draughts of inspiration are taken, direct from the fountainhead. Ovid, Juvenal, Persius, Catullus, and Seneca, are largely drawn from, while, strangely enough, Cicero, Boethius, and Virgil are quoted but seldom, the latter, indeed, only twice, though his commentators, especially Servetus, are frequently employed. The Bible, of course, is a never-failing source ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... a very difficult style: Catullus himself could hardly have bettered it. In grace, tenderness, simplicity, and humour it is worthy of the Ancients; and even more so, from the completeness and unity of the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Epicurism to Memmius, and had the honour to be set forth the second time by Cicero, so great a father of the Commonwealth; although himself disputes against that opinion in his own writings. Nor was the satirical sharpness or naked plainness of Lucilius, or Catullus, or Flaccus, by any order prohibited. And for matters of state, the story of Titus Livius, though it extolled that part which Pompey held, was not therefore suppressed by Octavius Caesar of the other faction. ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... Prosody, I have designedly omitted all special treatment of the lyric metres of Horace and Catullus, as well as of the measures of the comic poets. Our standard editions of these authors all give such thorough consideration to versification that repetition in a separate ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... who takes his cue From Dame Bovary's bourgeois troubles; There's Bourget, dyed his own sick "blue," There's Loti, blowing blue soap bubbles; There's Mendes[6] (no Catullus, he!) There's Richepin,[7] sick with sensual passion. The Dismal Throng! So foul, so free, Yet sombre ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... referred to a date at least sixty years after Ennius, and yet the rhythm is scarcely at all improved. The great number of second-rate poets who wrought in the same laboratory did good work, in so far that they made the technical part less wearisome for poets like Lucretius and Catullus. With mechanical dexterity taste also slowly improved by the competing effort of many ordinary minds; but it did not make those giant strides which nothing but genius can achieve. The later developments of the Epigram will be ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Long trammelled with the purple of her youth Against her age's ripe activity, Sits still upon her tombs, without death's ruth But also without life's brave energy. "Now tell us what is Italy?" men ask: And others answer, "Virgil, Cicero, Catullus, Caesar." What beside? to task The memory closer—"Why, Boccaccio, Dante, Petrarca,"—and if still the flask Appears to yield its wine by drops too slow,— "Angelo, Raffael, Pergolese,"—all Whose strong hearts beat through stone, or charged again The paints with fire of souls ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... altogether after foreign grammatical and metrical forms. This imitation of the Greek was not accomplished easily and without force: the Graecising was carried even to the length of a clumsy intermixture of the two languages. Gradually only was the poetical style smoothed and softened, and in Catullus we still perceive the last traces of its early harshness, which, however, are not without a certain rugged charm. Those constructions, and especially those compounds which were too much at variance with the internal structure of the Latin, and failed to become agreeable to ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Briton, now devoted itself to the editing of classic texts; the intellect that had been associated with the privately printed "Essay on Woman" was now associated with privately printed editions of Catullus which he fondly believed to be flawless, and of Theophrastus, whose Greek text it pleased him to print without accents. In his tranquil old age he made himself as many friends as in his hot manhood he had made himself enemies. Those who had most hated him came ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... London cockney's prefix of the letter h to innocent words beginning with a vowel having its prototype in the speech of the vulgar Roman, as may be seen in the verses of Catullus: ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the singer hears To lyre and lute and harp; Catullus waits to welcome him, And thro' the twilight sweet and dim, Sappho's forgotten songs are falling on ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale
... world for my dedication to your lordship; and if you can pardon my presumption in it, that a bad poet should address himself to so great a judge of wit, I may hope at least to escape with the excuse of Catullus, when he ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... bank; but I am sorry to see in the lines of a scholar like Gray the honied spring." But, as we have seen, honied is found in Milton; and Shakespeare also uses it in Hen. V. i. 1: "honey'd sentences." Mellitus is used by Cicero, Horace, and Catullus. The editor of an English dictionary, as Lord Grenville has remarked, ought to know "that the ready conversion of our substances into verbs, participles, and participial adjectives is of the very essence of our tongue, derived ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... a rake that he has been said to have "merited to be surnamed every woman's husband." Antony and Augustus were equally notorious. The same sensuality pervaded the masses as reigned in the courts, and was stimulated by the erotic poems of Ovid, Catullus, and other ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... removed from the courtly odes and their manner and ingenuity as the Marriage Hymn of Catullus from the Coma Berenices. The Volosp, however, has this in common with the mechanical odes, that equally with these it stands apart from epic, that equally with these it fuses epic material into an alien form. The sublimity of this great ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... operations between the age of nine and twelve. Of course this kept me apart from other boys and made me ripe for forcing. Anyway, while my generation was laboring through Uncle Remus I was honestly enjoying Catullus in ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... eulogised the two poems as an unmatchable achievement, although he mentioned the plays 'Romeo' and 'Richard' and 'more whose names I know not.' Richard Carew at the same time classed him with Marlowe as deserving the praises of an English Catullus. {79} Printers and publishers of the poems strained their resources to satisfy the demands of eager purchasers. No fewer than seven editions of 'Venus' appeared between 1594 and 1602; an eighth followed in 1617. 'Lucrece' ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... assertion was corroborated by the first colonists of America, who found the habit to be in common use amongst the aboriginal tribes. The Greeks and Romans certainly had a similar habit, but far from attaching any ill-omen to the sneeze they regarded it as of good augury. Thus Catullus assures us that when Cupid upon ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... admiration, and to miss your affection and loyalty is to lose one of life's chiefest delights. You are as quick to detect the humbug who hides his mediocrity behind an affectation of dignity as was dear old Yorick, of whom you will read when you have got to know the sweetness of Catullus. This Yorick it was who declared that the Frenchman's epigram describing gravity as "a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind," deserved "to be wrote in letters of gold"; and I make no doubt that had there been a greater recognition ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... gentleman," a citizen totus teres atque rotundus, his works are not profitable for the building up of that character. If it did, we must by parity of reasoning discard the discoveries of a misanthropic inventor and the theories of a bigamous chemist. We go to Plato and Catullus, to Shakespeare and Shelley, for what they have to give: if we go with our own pet notions of what that ought to be, we are naturally as disgusted as Herbert Spencer was with Homer and Tolstoy with Shakespeare. ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... hold sway for an enormous period of the world's history, from the times that we describe as ancient down to times that may fairly be called recent. The conception of the innocent and hilarious life of shepherds and shepherdesses certainly covered and absorbed the time of Theocritus, of Virgil, of Catullus, of Dante, of Cervantes, of Ariosto, of Shakespeare, and of Pope. We are told that the gods of the heathen were stone and brass, but stone and brass have never endured with the long endurance of the China Shepherdess. ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... one ashamed to groan at anything. Whatever comes to us is in the order of things, and the sound man accepts it as his lot. Yes, even Death—of which he says noble things. The old melodious weeping of the poets—Moschus over his mallows, and Catullus with his 'Soles occidere et redire possunt'—Whitman has no touch of that. Noble grief there is in him, and noble melancholy can come upon him, but acquiescence is his last word. He holds that all is good, because it exists, ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... strength, and says not all he can: And pleasantry will often cut clean through Hard knots that gravity would scarce undo. On this the old comedians rested: hence They're still the models of all men of sense, Despite Tigellius and his ape, whose song Is Calvus and Catullus all day long. ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... poets of the pre-Augustan and Augustan periods, unlike Horace, were all well born. Catullus and Calvus, his great predecessors in lyric poetry, were men of old and noble family Virgil, born five years before Horace, was the son of a Roman citizen of good property. Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid, who were respectively six, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... the edge of his mental anguish by physical exhaustion Catullus had walked far out from the town, through vineyards and fruit-orchards displaying their autumnal stores and clamorous with eager companies of pickers and vintagers. On coming back to the eastern gate he found himself reluctant ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... "If" and "Perhaps". If in Loving, Singing. If Thou'lt be Mine. If Thou wouldst have Me sing and play. Ill Omens. I love but Thee. Imitation. Imitation of Catullus. Imitation of the Inferno of Dante. Impromptu. Impromptu. Impromptu. Incantation. Incantation, An. Inconstancy. Indian Boat, The. In Myrtle Wreaths. Insurrection of the Papers, The. Intended Tribute. Intercepted Letters, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempriere, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brantome, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... the virgin-chorus in the beautiful epithalamium of Catullus, might be recognised in the youthful 'religieuse' if only human passion could be excluded; but the story of Heloise and Abelard is not a solitary proof of the superiority of human nature over an impossible and ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... may say that there is in a sense no Roman literature at all. Nothing grew out of the old Saturnian ballad-meter,—except perhaps Catullus, who certainly had no high inspiring impersonal song to sing. The Roman soul never grew up, never learned to express itself in its own way; before it had had time to do so, the Greek impulse that should have quickened it, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... purity of their style and their tender melancholy tone. A little apart is Esteban Manuel de VILLEGAS (1589-1669), an admirer of the Argensolas, "en versos cortos divino, insufrible en los mayores," who is known for his attempts in Latin meters and his successful imitations of Anacreon and Catullus. ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... he be from us, Virgil salutes him, and Theocritus; Catullus, mightiest-brained Lucretius, each Greets him, their brother, on the Stygian beach; Proudly a gaunt right hand doth Dante reach; Milton and Wordsworth bid him welcome home; Bright Keats to touch his raiment doth ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... his leave, after she had closed the door, stood for a moment immovable in the middle of the room, her gaze fixed on space, her eyes tearless. A poet or an artist, seeing her thus, would have been reminded of Ariadne, as Catullus describes her, after Theseus has abandoned her on the island of Naxos. All at once, as if she had but just succeeded in untying the knot of a cord that was strangling her, Pepita broke into heart-rending sobs, let loose a torrent ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... branches bloomed. For, when he talked, another spring began To which our May was winter; and, in the boughs Of his delicious thoughts, like feathered choirs, Bits of old rhyme, scraps from the Sabine farm, Celestial phrases from the Shepherd King, And fluttering morsels from Catullus sang. Much was fantastic. All was touched with light That only genius knows to steal from heaven. He spoke of poetry, as the "flowering time Of knowledge," called it "thought in passionate tune With those ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... been pitchforked into an affluent position—whose progenitors may have taken part in the "forty-five"—to go no further back—look with disdain upon the pretensions of those who have, within the short span of a single lifetime, realised a colossal fortune. But Catullus has truly said that there's "nothing so foolish as the laugh of fools," and many men still require to be ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... stars in the Greek heaven. But from whom are the greater part of Horace's Carmina borrowed (they should never be termed Odes), any more than those of Burns or Beranger, the analogous authors in modern times? and by what Greek minor poems are they surpassed? We say nothing of Catullus, whom some competent judges prefer to Horace. Does the lyric, then, or even the epic poetry of the Romans, deserve no better title than that of "a hot-house plant, which, in return for assiduous and skilful culture, yielded only scanty and sickly fruits?" ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... until they were introduced from Britain, for with the article of import came the name also, and the British "basket" became the Latin "bascauda." We have curious evidence of the high value attached to these baskets. Juvenal describes Catullus in fear of shipwreck throwing overboard his most precious treasures: "precipitare volens etiam pulcherrima," and among these "pulcherrima" he mentions "bascaudas." Martial bears a still higher testimony to the value set on "British baskets," reckoning ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... line 5. Tibullus, or the ... Author of the Schoolmistress. In the London Magazine Lamb wrote "Catullus." Tibullus was one of the tenderest of Latin poets. William Shenstone (1714-1763) wrote "The Schoolmistress," a favourite poem with Lamb. The "prettiest of poems" he called it in a letter ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... the time came, as I am glad to remember, not without sufficient courage if wholly without distinction, but there was ever more pleasure for me in the balancing of a rhyme than in the handling of a pike, and I would liefer have been Catullus than Caesar any day of the week. So the work that Dante did in his little leisure from application to arms is the work that wonders me and delights me, and that fills my memory, as I think ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... picture of his early years here.[1] His education would seem to have been good, but ordinary; and it is very doubtful if he ever went to a university.[2] Besides the authors mentioned in the Epistle to Henry Reynolds, he was certainly familiar with Ovid and Horace, and possibly with Catullus: while there seems no reason to doubt that he read Greek, though it is quite true that his references to Greek authors do not prove any first-hand acquaintance. He understood French, and read Rabelais and the French sonneteers, and he seems to have been acquainted with ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... Landino's work on Vergil and Horace merits the warmest praise. Lorenzo also impressed Poliziano into the work, whose labors in marking the various readings, in adding scholia and "notes" illustrative of the text of Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, etc., were of the utmost value. To Lorenzo and to his younger brother Giuliano, another great humanist, Giorgio Merula of Milan, dedicated his Plautus, published in Venice in 1472, showing at how early an age ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... Sallust), which are often quoted with a kind of holy horror, as though a pontifex maximus might not hold any opinion he pleased about death, and as though his doubt were not the common doubt of innumerable thinking men of the age.[835] Catullus wrote of death as "nox perpetua dormienda"; Lucretius, of course, gloried in the thought that there is no life beyond. In the following century the learned Pliny could write of death as the relapsing into the same nothingness as before we were born, and could scoff at the absurdities ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... subtlety, no fluctuation of fancy or passion is left unregistered, alike in their lighter and their graver moods. Sometimes the feeling is buried in masses of conceits, sometimes it is eagerly passionate, but even then always with an imaginative and florid passion, never directly as Sappho or Catullus is direct. Love appears in a hundred shapes amidst a shower of fantastic titles and attributes. Out of all the epithets that Meleager coins for him, one, set in a line of hauntingly liquid and languid rhythm, "delicate-sandalled,"[15] gives ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... this kind should, perhaps, more correctly be called monostrophic. The metres are in part regularly patterned and in part free. There are two Phaleucian verses which admit a spondee in the third foot, a practice often followed by Catullus in the second foot. ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... faithless to his formula. It is worth while to note that Joseph Warton's sympathy with the sentimental malady of the soul which lies at the core of Romanticism permitted him to be, perhaps, the first man since the Renaissance who recognised with pleasure the tumult of the Atys of Catullus and the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... put here, and told to make the best of things; and I intend to make the best of things. I am going to do what I like with my life. Wrong and right are merely relative terms. They change to fit their environment. Baudelaire would not have been tolerated in the Hampstead Garden Suburb; Catullus would not have been received in Sparta. But at Paris and Rome customs were different. We only frame philosophies to suit our wishes. And I prefer to follow my own inclinations to those ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... very just one, except with regard to one point—the misunderstanding of the atmosphere in which the book was created, and the ignoring of the examples of a similar tendency furnished by literature as well as by the popular taste. Was it not the Ancients that began it? Aristophanes, Catullus, Petronius, Martial, flew in the face of decency in their ideas as well as in the words they used, and they dragged after them in this direction not a few of the Latin poets of the Renaissance, who believed themselves bound ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Walter Savage Landor, that very original and eccentric thinker, published in the extraordinary magazine one of his admirable "Imaginary Conversations." Mr. Julius (afterwards Archdeacon) Hare reviewed the robust works of Landor. Mr. Elton contributed graceful translations from Catullus, Propertius, &c. Even among the lesser contributors there were very eminent writers, not forgetting Barry Cornwall, Hartley Coleridge, John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant poet; and Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet. Nor must we ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of the vine, contributed to making this being beautifully balanced, reserved, refined. The instruction and cultivation of the classic and French poets and thinkers, Virgil and Racine and Marivaux, Catullus and Montaigne and Chateaubriand, the chambers of the Hotel de Rambouillet, the gardens and galleries of Versailles, the immense drawing-room of eighteenth-century Paris, helped form this spirit. In all this man's music one catches sight ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... was one of the greatest of Roman satirists. The later satirists of the corrupt imperial era were his imitators. Besides Lucilius, there appeared during the later republican era only two other poets of distinguished merit, Lucretius and Catullus. Lucretius (95-51 B.C.) was an evolutionist, and in his great poem, On the Nature of Things, we find anticipated many of ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... and the fustian in them, as can well be jumbled together, and are of that sort of nonsense, which so perfectly confounds all ideas, that there is no distinct one left in the mind. Further he says of him, that he hath prophesy'd his own poetry shall be sweeter than Catullus, Ovid and Tibullus; but we have little hope of the accomplishment of it from what he hath lately published.' Upon which Mr. Oldmixon has not spared a reflexion, that the placing the laurel on the head of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... branches of the ilexes, across the blue sea, streaked like a Ravenna mosaic with purple and green, shimmer the white houses and walls, the steeple and towers, an enchanted Fata Morgana city, of dim Porto Venere; ... and I mumble to myself the verse of Catullus, but addressing a greater and more terrible goddess ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... and torrent-beds, and their lower slopes clothed with olive groves, vineyards, and forest trees. Lunar marble was first brought to Rome in the time of Julius Caesar; and Mamurra, so bitterly reviled by Catullus, the commander of the artificers in Caesar's army in Gaul, lined with great slabs of this marble the outside and inside of his house on the Coelian Hill—the first recorded instance of veneering or incrusting walls with marble. The discovery of this method of cutting marble into thin slices, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the wedding-song, so called because of its refrain "Hymen O! Hymenae' O!" The god of marriage, Hymen, took his origin and name from the hymn, was afterwards decked out richly with myths, and finally, according to Catullus, received a seat on ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... refer? If to the canonical epistle, to what part? To the words (above quoted) "forbidden records" there is a foot-note, which contains only the well-known passage in Horace, lib. i. od. xi., and two others from Propertius and Catullus. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... a large quarto, but of a very different character. It is the Baskerville impression of the elegiac poets,—Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius: Birmingham, 1772. No books are more delightful to sight and touch than the Baskerville classics. This Catullus of mine is printed on the softest and glossiest post paper, with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... a little Latin from some Criticisms and Elucidations of Catullus, by H. Munro, who edited Lucretius so capitally that even German Scholars, I am told, accept it with a respect which they accord to very few English. Do you know it in America? If not, do. The Text and capital English prose Translation in vol. I; and Notes in vol. II: all admirable, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... the author of the Pervigilium Veneris is still a lis sub judice. Aldus, Erasmus, and Meursius, attributed it to Catullus; but subsequent editors have, with much more probability, contended that its age is considerably later. We may notice a scholastic and philosophical spirit about it, which is ill-suited to the Bard of Verona. Lipsius claimed it for the Augustan ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... her child. Melissa had to admire the dead girl's lute, and her first piece of weaving, and the elegant loom of ebony and ivory in which she had woven it. And Berenike repeated to the girl the verses which Korinna had composed, in imitation of Catullus, on the death of a favorite bird. And although Melissa's eyes were almost closing with fatigue, she forced herself to attend to it all, for she saw now how much her sympathy pleased ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... whom it is difficult to keep up the first love, or rather whose defects begin before long to urge themselves upon the critical lover (some would say there are no critical lovers, but that I deny) with an even less happy result than is recorded in one of Catullus's finest lines. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... then produces a lucky trifle. We still read the Dove of Anacreon, and Sparrow of Catullus; and a writer naturally pleases himself with a performance, which owes nothing to the subject. But compositions merely pretty have the fate of other pretty things, and are quitted in time for something ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... salon, this evening, this dwelling—what a frame for the portrait of the young girl whom these persons were now studying with the profound attention of a painter in presence of the Margharita Doni, one of the glories of the Pitti palace. Modeste,—blossom enclosed, like that of Catullus,—was she worth all ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... not an Ovid, with no sense of the limits of either indulgence or expression. He is not a Catullus, tormented by the furies of youthful passion. The flame never really burned him. We search his pages in vain for evidence of sincere and absorbing passion, whether of the flesh or of the spirit. He was guilty of no breach of the morals of his time, and it is likely also, in spite ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... Friday. Read, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Write ten lines of Latin on writing days. Read five chapters of Greek Testament on reading days. For morning reading, either Polybius, or Diodorus Siculus, or some tracts of Xenophon or Plato; and for Latin, Catullus, Tibullus, ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... architecture—embowered in white lilacs, and surrounded by an orchard of ancient apple-trees which cast a rich shade on the deep spring grass. The orchard had the impressiveness of those old religious groves, dedicated to the strange worship of sylvan gods, gods to be found now only in Horace or Catullus, and in the hearts of young poets to whom the beautiful ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... who have, more judiciously, attempted to preserve the personality of the classical divinities have failed from a different cause. They have been imitators, and imitators at a disadvantage. Euripides and Catullus believed in Bacchus and Cybele as little as we do. But they lived among men who did. Their imaginations, if not their opinions, took the colour of the age. Hence the glorious inspiration of the Bacchae and the Atys. Our minds are formed ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that the plural Britannise used for Britain in the "Confession" can only refer to Great Britain, because that country was sub-divided by the Romans into five distinct provinces. The reason given cannot be convincing, because Catullus, who died in the year 54, used the plural for Britain before the Roman sub-divisions were made, when he wrote, "Nunc timent Galliae, timent Britanniae"—Caesar, "the Gauls and the Britons fear." The plural was used by St. Patrick when writing the "Confession" ...
— Bolougne-Sur-Mer - St. Patrick's Native Town • Reverend William Canon Fleming
... culture with a timidity, which caused it voluntarily to abdicate many of its own powers. Where do we find in the Augustan period of the language so grand a pair of epithets as these, occurring as they do in a single line of Catullus: Ubi cerva silvicultrix, ubi aper nemorivagus? or again, as his 'fluentisonus'? Virgil's vitisator (Aen. 7, 179) is not his own, but derived from one of the earlier poets. Nay, the language did not even retain those compound epithets which it once had formed, ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench |
