hat of some gifted and terrible child,
that makes him unique among poets. When he leaves the golden fields of
poetry and dashes into political lampoons, or insolent and unquotable
attacks on people (men or women) who had the misfortune to displease
him, he becomes like Burns again, Burns the satirist; yet even here
nimbler witted, lighter of touch, with the keenness of the rapier
rather than of the Northern axe-edge.

His scholarliness--like that of most scholars--was not without its
drawbacks. His immediate literary masters, the Greeks of the
Alexandrian school, were a coterie of pedants; it would be idle to
claim that he remained unaffected by their pedantry. In the last years
of his life he seems to have lost himself somewhat in technical
intricacies and elaborate metrical experiments; in translations from
that prince in preciosity, the Alexandrian Callimachus; and idyllic
pieces of overloaded ornament studied from the school of Theocritus.
The longest and most ambitious poem of these years, the epic idyl on
'The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis,' is full of exquisite beauties of
detail, but taken in its whole effect is languid, cloying, and
monotonous. He makes a more brilliant success in his other long poem,
the famous 'Atys,' the single example in Latin of the large-scale
lyric so familiar to Greece and England.

But indeed in every form of lyric poetry attempted by him, his touch
is infallible. The lovely poems of travel which he wrote during and
after a voyage to Asia are as unequaled in their sunny beauty as the
love-lyrics are in fire and passion. Alongside of these there are
little funny verses to his friends, and other verses to his enemies
which they probably did not think funny in the least; verses of
occasion and verses of compliment; and verses of sympathy, with a deep
human throb in them that shows how little his own unhappy love had
embittered him or shut him up in selfish broodings. Two of these
pieces are pre-eminent beyond all the rest. The one is a marriage song
written by him for the wedding of two of his friends, Mallius
Torquatus and Vinia Aurunculeia. In its straightforward unassuming
grace, in its musical clearness, in the picture it draws, with so
gentle and yet so refined and distinguished a touch, of common
household happiness, it is worthy of its closing place in the golden
volume of his lyrics.

The other is a brief poem, only ten lines long, written at his
brother's grave near Troy. It