Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VL THE ROMAN-ALEXANDBINE AND LONGER POEMS OP CATULLUS. That portion of the poetry of Catullus which has been considered hitherto is doubtless the most genuine and original; but, with the exception of the two epitha- lamia, the poems now to be examined, as moulded on the Alexandrine form and subjects, are perhaps the more curious in a literary point of view. Contrasting with the rest of his poetry in their lack of " naturalism essentially Eoman and republican," they savour undis- guisedly of that Roman-Alexandriuism- in poetry which first sprang up in earnest among the contemporaries of Cicero and Caesar, and grew with all the more rapidity owing to the frequent visits of the Eomans to the Greek provinces, and the increasing influx of the Greek literati into Eome. Of the Alexandrine literature at its fountain-head it must be remembered that it was the substitute and successor—on the ruin of the Hellenic nation, and the decline of its nationality, language, literature, and art—of the former national and popular literature of Greece. But it was confined to a limited range. " It was," says Professor Momnisen, " only in a comparatively narrow circle, not of men of culture—for such, strictly speaking, did not exist—but of men of erudition, that the Greek literature was cherished even when dead; that the rich inheritance which it had left was inventoried with melancholy pleasure or arid refinement of research; and'that the living'sense of sympathy or the dead erudition was elevated into a semblance of productiveness. This posthumous productiveness constitutes the so-called Alexandrinism." Originality found a substitute in learned research. Multifarious learning, the result of deep draughts at the wells of criticism, grammar, mythology, and antiquit'es, gave an often cumbro...