culty he seems to find in taking up the right position and point of view in controverting opinions which differ from his own: he will attack for instance the conclusions of others by arguing against them from his own premisses, instead of shewing either that the premisses are wrong on which those conclusions are grounded, or that the conclusions do not follow from those premisses. The 54th poem, of seven lines, he severs into three different fragments, and assumes a lacuna of 5 lines between the first and second of these, and a lacuna of one line between the second and third. I have now reprinted a short article, written a few years ago for the Journal of Philology, in which I try to shew that this poem as it stands in the Mss. forms a perfect and satisfactory whole. Ellis in his commentary, while he speaks of me in terms for which I feel most grateful, tho' ashamed, controverts my views and adheres to his own. I on the other hand have appended to my article some remarks, tending as I think to strengthen my own argument and to invalidate his. Which of the two has most reason or probability on his side, it is of course for others to determine. But what I would speak of now is the method of his reasoning. He draws up four formal arguments, headed 1, 2, 3, 4, to prove me to be wrong and the poem to be fragmentary, all of which I have touched on elsewhere. But I will here take the 4th for a specimen: (4) Nothing is gained by interpreting the poem as a complete whole. Everything shows that the Ms. of Catullus from which all extant Mss. spring was imperfect. Why should we deny here', and so on. Can he not see that this is no argument at all, but a mere assertion that he is right and I am wrong? If the poem is a complete whole, then surely something is gained by interpreting it as a complete whole. If it is a heap of fragments, then of course nothing is gained by so doing, but on the contrary the labour is thrown away. Let others judge between us; but such a mere assertion has no more force of demonstration than if one of two litigants were to asseverate in court that he is right and his adversary wrong. Then as to what he says here of the imperfection of our Mss., the whole of my book will prove that I quite go along with him; tho' the onus probandi presses heavily on him, who maintains that they have thus tossed together into one apparent whole a congeries of incoherent fragments. But Ellis can take on occasion quite a different view of our Mss. After 64 23, a passage which I have discussed in its place, the Veronese scholia of Virgil give us the commencement of a verse which has disappeared from the Mss. of Catullus, a verse which no modern editor, except Ellis, for a moment hesitates to assign to Catullus. But, says Ellis, the weight of the Veronese Scholia, imperfect and full of lacunae as they are, is not to be set against our Mss.' And yet he does not even attempt to shew that Mai and after him Keil have not rightly deciphered every letter of the words 'saluete deum gens, o bona matrum Progenies saluete iter...' And if they are right, how should there be any doubt of the genuineness of these words, when we cannot even conceive any motive for interpolation, and can so readily conceive the dropping out of a line in the Ms. from which all the others are derived? Where I have attempted to correct the text of Catullus, I have tried to bear in raind the very pertinent remark of Schwabe that no successful or convincing emendations have been made in that text, which depart widely from the Ms. reading. Again and again I have had to call attention to the singular pertinacity with which G or O, or both of them, interchange certain letters; most of all perhaps e and o; then r, t (c), rt and tr; sc and s; n and r; n and u; ƒ and s; and final m and s. I have reprinted two or three longer and as many shorter articles which have appeared at intervals in the Journal of Philology during the last ten years. It was not possible to remodel them without confusing times and circumstances. I have appended to each of them remarks and criticisms, designed in some cases to confirm, in others to modify what I had said. I have been a good deal surprised to see how often Schwabe, Ellis and Baehrens alike have retained the barbarous spellings of our Mss. which are of much too late a date to have any authority in questions of orthography. A good lesson on this head is read to us, if in the 62nd poem we compare with the other Mss. the Paris codex of the 9th century which contains that poem: it offers the correct spellings-iucunda, iucundior, conubium, conubia-; while the other Mss. have the corrupt spellings-iocunda, iocundior, connubium, connubia. Nay, in 100 4 'sodalicium' of V, the only genuine form of the word, is changed to 'sodalitium' by Schwabe, by Baehrens, and by Ellis in his text, tho' the last has corrected the mistake in his commentary. This will help to increase the uncertainty which already exists, especially in our country, where the minds of scholars appear to be so very unsettled with regard to Latin orthography; tho' the spelling of classical Latin, if we only allow for that amount of variety which certain periods of transition admitted, is now fixed and known. TRINITY COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE: December 1877. 1 Quoi dono lepidum nouum libellum 5 iam tum cum ausus es unus Italorum quare habe tibi quicquid hoc libelli, qualecumque quidem patronei ut ergo 10 plus uno maneat perenne saeclo. 9 quidem Itali. quod V. patroni ut ergo Bergk. patrona uirgo V. Qualecumque; quod, o patrona uirgo uulgo. I think it worth while to offer the following remarks on this short and simple poem, even at the risk of what I say appearing to have in it little that is new and important. All recent Editors adopt in the last line but one what seems the simple and obvious correction of the Mss.: Qualecumque, quod o patrona uirgo. I would here observe in the first place that 'quicquid hoc qualecumque' can hardly come together without a connecting particle: thus several of the M. C. 1 older Editors add et after libelli. So Tacitus ann. XIV 55 has 'quidquid illud et qualecumque tribuisset’. But this correction the rhythm of Catullus will not admit of. If the common reading therefore be right, surely we must join 'Qualecumque quod' (i.e. quod qualecumque), just as Martial has Hoc qualecumque' in VII 26 3, a poem which contains another imitation of Catullus. But the patrona uirgo' offers more difficulty. Who is she? Minerva, some say. Impossible. The Muse, say others and with more reason. That in a certain sense the Muse may be called the patron of a poet, I would not deny, though the two authorities cited by Ellis, in which the poet is said conversely to be the client of the Muse or Muses, are neither of them of much weight. But why the strangely vague 'patrona uirgo' with nothing to point its meaning? Why could he not have written 'patrona Musa'? And if the Muse be the poet's patron, surely she is so in the sense of being his helper, his inspirer and mouthpiece. She dictates the verses and must see to it, that they be worthy of long life. Thus the spurious Sulpicia, quoted by Ellis, bids the Muse come down and help her client. A sorry volume, a quicquid hoc libelli', a 'quod qualecumque' would be her disgrace, as much as the poet's. It is a different patron that would have to nurse into fame such a production. It is in such a sense as this that the poets always call on the Muses to dictate the words which they cannot find for themselves: ἄειδε, θεά: ἄνδρα μοι evvette, Movσa: Musa, uelim causas memores: Pandite nunc Helicona, deae, cantusque mouete. And so Catullus himself: Non possum reticere, deae, qua me |