Of course it is true that many of Martial’s lyrics would be thought disgusting in any well-regulated convict establishment.  His gallantry is rarely “honourable.”  Scaliger used to burn a copy of Martial, once a year, on the altar of Catullus, who himself was far from prudish.  But Martial, somehow, kept his heart undepraved, and his taste in books was excellent.  How often he writes verses for the bibliophile, delighting in the details of purple and gold, the illustrations and ornaments for his new volume!  These pieces are for the few—­for amateurs, but we may all be touched by his grief for the little lass, Erotion.  He commends her in Hades to his own father and mother gone before him, that the child may not be frightened in the dark, friendless among the shades

“Parvula ne nigras horrescat Erotion umbras
Oraque Tartarei prodigiosa canis.”

There is a kind of playfulness in the sorrow, and the pity of a man for a child; pity that shows itself in a smile.  I try to render that other inscription for the tomb of little Erotion: 

Here lies the body of the little maid
Erotion;
From her sixth winter’s snows her eager shade
Hath fleeted on! 
Whoe’er thou be that after me shalt sway
My scanty farm,
To her slight shade the yearly offering pay,
So—­safe from harm—­
Shall thou and thine revere the kindly Lar,
And this alone
Be, through thy brief dominion, near or far,
A mournful stone!

Certainly he had a heart, this foul-mouthed Martial, who claimed for the study of his book no serious hours, but moments of mirth, when men are glad with wine, “in the reign of the Rose:”  {9}

“Haec hora est tua, cum furit Lyaeus,
Cum regnat rosa, cum madent capilli;
Tunc mevel rigidi legant Catones.”

But enough of the poets of old; another day we may turn to Carew and Suckling, Praed and Locker, poets of our own speech, lighter lyrists of our own time. {10}

ON VERS DE SOCIETE

To Mr. Gifted Hopkins.

Dear Gifted,—­If you will permit me to use your Christian, and prophetic, name—­we improved the occasion lately with the writers of light verse in ancient times.  We decided that the ancients were not great in verses of society, because they had, properly speaking, no society to write verses for.  Women did not live in the Christian freedom and social equality with men, either in Greece or Rome—­at least not “modest women,” as Mr. Harry Foker calls them in “Pendennis.”  About the others there is plenty of pretty verse in the Anthology.  What you need for verses of society is a period in which the social equality is recognized, and in which people are peaceable enough and comfortable enough to “play with light loves in the portal” of the Temple of Hymen, without any very definite intentions, on either part, of going inside and getting married.