has an intangible and inexpressible beauty such as never recurs in the
more mature art of greater masters. But Catullus has no narrative gift;
his use of the hexameter is confined to a limited set of rhythms which in
a poem about the length of a book of the _Georgics_ become hopelessly
monotonous; and it finally stops, rather than ends, when the writer (as
is already the case with the reader) grows tired of it. It is remarkable
that the poet who in the lightness and speed of his other metres is
unrivalled in Latin, should, when he attempts the hexameter, be more
languid and heavy, not only than his successors, but than his
contemporaries. Here, as in the elaborate imitations of Callimachus with
which he tested his command of the Latin elegiac, he is weak because he
wanders off the true line, not from any failure in his own special gift,
which was purely and simply lyrical. When he uses the elegiac verse to
express his own feeling, as in the attacks on political or personal
enemies, it has the same direct lucidity (as of an extraordinarily gifted
child) which is the essential charm of his lyrics.

It is just this quality, this clear and almost terrible simplicity, that
puts Catullus in a place by himself among the Latin poets. Where others
labour in the ore of thought and gradually forge it out into sustained
expression, he sees with a single glance, and does not strike a second
time. His imperious lucidity is perfectly unhesitating in its action;
whether he is using it for the daintiest flower of sentiment--_fair
passions and bountiful pities and loves without stain_--or for the
expression of his fiery passions and hatreds in some flagrant obscenity
or venomous insult, it is alike straight and reckless, with no scruple
and no mincing of words; in Mr. Swinburne's curiously true and vivid
phrase, he "makes mouths at our speech" when we try to follow him.

With the death of Catullus and Calvus, an era in Latin poetry definitely