Latin Love Poetry

248 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY a sort of artistic counter-irritant. In this, as in all of his books, Mr Knight dashes to work with an uninhibited zest that most writers on literature are too tepid to feel or too cowardly to admit. It is exhilarating to watch him hurdle rules of grammar and findings of historical research as blithely as Henry Ward 'Beecher ever took the one obstacle or Mr Henry Ford the other. All the more pity, I repeat, that the book as a whole falls short of "Shakespearian integrity." I am bound to confess that the chapter on Byron defeats !l1e almost utterly: it is all too aptly named "The Two Eternities." It could, with great advantage, be reduced to half its present, length-it takes up nearly one-third of the book-and the space saved might be devoted to the missing chapter on "The Holistic Conception of Art." No doubt Marino Fa/itro and Sardanapalus are not much read nowadays. But thirty-six pages of wi,thering abstract are enough to extinguish any oracle that ever burned. And to read that "in the eight hundred double-column pages of [Byron's] stupendous output ... there is scarcely one really weak line" is to feel dubious about the validity of some of Mr Knight's enthusiasms. LATIN LOVE POETRY' W. D, WOODHEAD The very form in which these two volumes have been produced is an inrucation of their difference of content: the first neat and attractive, as though a tribute by the publisher himself to a poet who would have appreciated such things ; the second more matterof -fact and austere, as befits a work of erudition composed for the professional scholar. Each writer has done his work admirably,' but the purposes with ' which the two books were written are so different that to compare them would be idle. Professor Day's book is somewhat like that of a skilled detective . Imagine a stately edifice (the Pantheon of the Roman I TIlt Lyric Genius oj Ciliullru, by E. A. Havdock [Professor of Latin, Victoria College) Uruversity of Toronto), Blackwell. Oxford, 8s. 6d. The Origins of Latin Love-Elegy, by A. A. Day. Blackwell, Oxford~ 75. 6d. 21n Havelock's Calulltu should not the nrst line of the 6£th stanza on page 61 read: "Impossible to Jay aside for ever"? In Day's book there are many typo.graphical ereors, mostly in the Greek (about ten on pages 45.6 alone), which should be corrected in (1 new edition. 248 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY a sort of artistic counter-irritant. In this, as in all of his books, Mr Knight dashes to work with an uninhibited zest that most writers on literature are too tepid to feel or too cowardly to admit. It is exhilarating to watch him hurdle rules of grammar and findings of historical research as blithely as Henry Ward 'Beecher ever took the one obstacle or Mr Henry Ford the other. All the more pity, I repeat, that the book as a whole falls short of "Shakespearian integrity." I am bound to confess that the chapter on Byron defeats !l1e almost utterly: it is all too aptly named "The Two Eternities." It could, with great advantage, be reduced to half its present, length-it takes up nearly one-third of the book-and the space saved might be devoted to the missing chapter on "The Holistic Conception of Art." No doubt Marino Fa/itro and Sardanapalus are not much read nowadays. But thirty-six pages of wi,thering abstract are enough to extinguish any oracle that ever burned. And to read that "in the eight hundred double-column pages of [Byron's] stupendous output ... there is scarcely one really weak line" is to feel dubious about the validity of some of Mr Knight's enthusiasms. LATIN LOVE POETRY' W. D, WOODHEAD The very form in which these two volumes have been produced is an inrucation of their difference of content: the first neat and attractive, as though a tribute by the publisher himself to a poet who would have appreciated such things ; the second more matterof -fact and austere, as befits a work...