pring."

It does not quite give the sense Alcman intended, the lament for his
limbs weary with old age--with old age sadder for the sight of the honey-
voiced girls.

The Greeks had not the kind of society that is the home of "Society
Verses," where, as Mr. Locker says, "a _boudoir_ decorum is, or ought
always to be, preserved, where sentiment never surges into passion, and
where humour never overflows into boisterous merriment." Honest women
were estranged from their mirth and their melancholy.

The Romans were little more fortunate. You cannot expect the genius of
Catullus not to "surge into passion," even in his hours of gayer song,
composed when

_Multum lusimus in meis tabellis_,
_Ut convenerat esse delicatos_,
_Scribens versiculos uterque nostrum_.

Thus the lighter pieces of Catullus, like the dedication of his book, are
addressed to _men_, his friends, and thus they scarcely come into the
category of what we call "Society Verses." Given the character of Roman
society, perhaps we might say that plenty of this kind of verse was
written by Horace and by Martial. The famous ode to Pyrrha does not
exceed the decorum of a Roman _boudoir_, and, as far as love was
concerned, it does not seem to have been in the nature of Horace to
"surge into passion." So his best songs in this kind are addressed to
men, with whom he drinks a little, and talks of politics and literature a
great deal, and muses over the shortness of life, and the zest that snow-
clad Soracte gives to the wintry fire.

Perhaps the ode to Leuconoe, which Mr. Austin Dobson has rendered so
prettily in a _villanelle_, may come within the scope of this Muse, for
it has a playfulness mingled with its melancholy, a sadness in its play.
Perhaps, too, if Horace is to be done into verse, these old French forms
seem as fit vehicles as any for Latin poetry that was written in the
exotic measures of Greece. There is a foreign grace and a little
technical difficulty overcome in the _English ballade and villanelle_, as
in the Horatian sapphics and alcaics. I would not say so much, on my own
responsibility, nor trespass so far on the domain of scholarship, but
this opinion was communicated to me by a learned professor of Latin. I
think, too, that some of the lyric measures of the old French Pleiad, of
Ronsard and Du Bellay, would be well wedded with the verse of Horace. But
perhaps no translator will ever please any one but himself, and of Horace