Catullus has been compared to Keats, but the comparison is not a happy one. His nearest analogy among modern poets is Burns. Both were, in Tennyson's phrase, "dowered with the love of love, the scorn of scorn," and, in the poems of both, those passions find the intensest expression. Both had an exquisite sympathy with all that appeals, either in nature or in humanity, to the senses and the affections. Both were sensualists and libertines without being effeminate, or without being either depraved or hardened. In both, indeed, an infinite tenderness is perhaps the predominating feature. Both had humour, that of Catullus being the more caustic, that of Burns the more genial. Both were distinguished by sincerity and simplicity; both waged war with charlatanry and baseness. Burns had the richer nature and was the greater as a man; Catullus was the more accomplished artist.
But it is time to turn to the book which has recalled Catullus and Lesbia. Mr. Tremenheere has, with great ingenuity, succeeded in concocting by a process of elaborate dovetailing a very pretty romance which he divides into nine chapters, the first being "The Birth of Love," the second, third and fourth, "Possession," "Quarrels" and "Reconciliation," the fifth, sixth, and seventh, "Doubt," "A Brother's Death" and "Unfaithfulness," the last two, "Avoidance" and "The Death of Love." The chief objection to this is that it is for the most part fanciful, and is absolutely without warrant, either from tradition or from probability. Many of the poems pressed into the service of his narrative by Mr. Tremenheere have nothing whatever to do with Lesbia. Such would be xiii., "The invitation to Fabullus," xiv., "The Acme and Septimius."
The translations are very unequal. Of many of them it may be said in Dogberry's phrase that they "are tolerable and not to be endured," or to borrow an expression from Byron "so middling bad were better." Thus the powerful poem to Gellius (xci.) is attenuated into:—
'Twas not that I esteem'd you were
As constant or incapable
Of vulgar baseness, but that she
For whom great love was wasting me,
The spice of incest lacked for you;
And though we were old friends, 'tis true,
That seem'd poor cause to my poor mind,