Note 3 — Chapter I
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Catullus, while eagerly enjoying his life, seems, in regard to the political turmoil of his time, to 'daff the world aside, and bid it pass': yet there is, as has been well said3, a rough republican flavour in his careless satire; and he retained to the last, and boldly asserted, what was the earliest, as well as the latest, instinct of ancient liberty—the spirit of resistance to the arbitrary rule of any single man.