Perhaps the ode to Leuconoe, which Mr. Austin Dobson has rendered so prettily in a villanelle, may come within the scope of this Muse, for it has a playfulness mingled with its melancholy, a sadness in its play.  Perhaps, too, if Horace is to be done into verse, these old French forms seem as fit vehicles as any for Latin poetry that was written in the exotic measures of Greece.  There is a foreign grace and a little technical difficulty overcome in the English ballade and villanelle, as in the Horatian sapphics and alcaics.  I would not say so much, on my own responsibility, nor trespass so far on the domain of scholarship, but this opinion was communicated to me by a learned professor of Latin.  I think, too, that some of the lyric measures of the old French Pleiad, of Ronsard and Du Bellay, would be well wedded with the verse of Horace.  But perhaps no translator will ever please any one but himself, and of Horace every man must be his own translator.

It may be that Ovid now and then comes near to writing vers de societe, only he never troubles himself for a moment about the “decorum of the boudoir.”  Do you remember the lines on the ring which he gave his lady?  They are the origin and pattern of all the verses written by lovers on that pretty metempsychosis which shall make them slippers, or fans, or girdles, like Waller’s, and like that which bound “the dainty, dainty waist” of the Miller’s Daughter.

   “Ring that shalt bind the finger fair
   Of my sweet maid, thou art not rare;
   Thou hast not any price above
   The token of her poet’s love;
   Her finger may’st thou mate as she
   Is mated every wise with me!”

And the poet goes on, as poets will, to wish he were this favoured, this fortunate jewel: 

“In vain I wish!  So, ring, depart,
And say ’with me thou hast his heart’!”

Once more Ovid’s verses on his catholic affection for all ladies, the brown and the blonde, the short and the tall, may have suggested Cowley’s humorous confession, “The Chronicle”: 

“Margarita first possessed,
If I remember well, my breast,
Margarita, first of all;”

and then follows a list as long as Leporello’s.

What disqualifies Ovid as a writer of vers de societe is not so much his lack of “decorum” as the monotonous singsong of his eternal elegiacs.  The lightest of light things, the poet of society, should possess more varied strains; like Horace, Martial, Thackeray, not like Ovid and (here is a heresy) Praed.  Inimitably well as Praed does his trick of antithesis, I still feel that it is a trick, and that most rhymers could follow him in a mere mechanic art.  But here the judgment of Mr. Locker would be opposed to this modest opinion, and there would be opposition again where Mr. Locker calls Dr. O. W. Holmes “perhaps the best living writer of this species of verse.”  But here we are straying among the moderns before exhausting the ancients, of whom I fancy that Martial, at his best, approaches most near the ideal.