Note 63 — Chapter XV

the 'bright speed' of the pure iambic, so happily answering to the subject of the 'phaselus,' and its bold impetus as it is employed in the attack on Julius Caesar—the irregular but sonorous grandeur of his Sapphic63,—the majesty which in the Hymn to Diana blends with the buoyant movement of the glyconic,—all attest that the words and melody of the poems were born together with the feeling and meaning animating them. Although his elegiac poems are not written with the smoothness and fluency which was attained by the Augustan poets, yet those among them which record his graver and sadder moods have a plaintive force and natural pathos, which their roughness seems to enhance. If his epigrammatic pieces, written in that metre, want the polish and point to which his brilliant disciple attained under the Empire, we may believe that Catullus experienced the difficulty which Lucilius found, and which Horace at last successfully overcame, of adapting a metre originally framed for the expression of serious feeling to the commoner interests and experiences of life.