Gratian.—Don’t talk of golden pippins, or I shall mount my hobby, and go through the genealogy of my whole orchard, and good-bye to Catullus.
Curate.—If you give way to your imagination, you may invent a thousand meanings to the passage; but taking it as I find it, I would attach only this meaning to it,—that Catullus would say, “Lesbia’s favourite sparrow” would be as attractive to me as was the golden apple which was thrown in her way when she was racing, to Atalanta. She was to be married to the first youth who could outrun her, so that literally she was very much run after.
Gratian.—Run after, indeed! Her pursuer, Hippomanes, hadn’t my rheumatism (tapping his knee and leg with his stick) or she would have had the apple, and not him. You young men of modern days do not throw your golden apples, but look to pick up what you can. These old tales, or old fables, cast a shade of shame upon our unromantic days. There was a king’s daughter offered like a “handy-cap,” as if the worthy of mankind were a racing stud.
Aquilius.—But the lady was not so easily won after all; for there were three golden apples to be picked up: and a bold man was he that threw them, for if he lost, there was neither love nor mercy for him. The condition was worse than Sinbad’s. It is a strange story this of Atalanta and her lover, turned into lions by Cybele. The passage in Catullus being corrupt, there is probably an omission, for, as it is, the transition is very abrupt.
Gratian.—I see the golden apples running about in all directions, and am half asleep, and should be quite so but for this rheumatic hint that it is time to retire: so good-night.
Now you will conclude, Eusebius, that I and the Curate made a night and morning of it. On the present occasion, at least, it was not the case; we very soon parted.
The following morning, which for the season was freshly sunny, found us on a seat under a verandah near the breakfast room, and close to the aviary, from which we had a moment before come; and the Curate was then wringing his finger after the bites and pecks the bullfinch had given him, which Gratian told him, jocularly, was having a comment on the text at his finger’s end, and immediately asked for Catullus. The book was opened—and the Curate put his finger upon the “Death of Lesbia’s Sparrow,”—which he read as he had thus rendered it:—
de passere mortuo lesbiæ.
Ye Graces, and ye Cupids, mourn,
And all that’s graceful, woman born,
My sweet one’s sparrow dead!
Smitten by death’s fatal arrow
Lies my darling’s darling sparrow!
As the eyes in her sweet head
She did love him, and he knew her
As my fair one knows her mother;
He was sweet as honey to her,
In her lap for ever sitting,
Hither thither round her flitting,
To his mistress and no other
He address’d his twittering tale.
Now adown death’s darksome vale
He is gone to seek a bourn
Whence they tell us none return.
Plague upon you, dark and narrow
Shades of Orcus, without pity
Swallowing every thing that’s pretty—
As ye took the pretty sparrow.
Wo’s the day that you lie dead!
Little wretch, ’tis all your doing
That my fair one’s eyes are red,
Swoln and red with tearful rueing.
Aquilius.—It would be childish to blame the poor bird for the crime of dying, as if he had died out of spite; when, if the truth could be told, perhaps the cat killed him. (At this moment, Gratian’s favourite cat rubbed herself against his legs, first her face and head, and then her back, and looked up to him, as if begging him to plead for her race; and he did so, and spoke kindly to her, and said, pussey would not kill any bird though he should trust her in the aviary; and she, as if she knew what he said, walked off to it, and rubbed her face against the wires, and returned to us again.) Well, I continued, I don’t see why the bird should be called wretch fer that; and factum male means to express misfortune, not fault. So let the malefactum be the Curate’s, and treat him accordingly.