bears evidence of Burton’s hand.  The preface then goes on to say that “a complete and literal translation of the works of Catullus, on the same lines and in the same format as the present volume, is now in preparation.”  A letter, however, written[FN#621] by Burton to Mr. W. F. Kirby, sets the matter entirely at rest.  “I am at present,” he says, “engaged in translating the Priapeia, Latin verse, which has never appeared in English, French, or German garb; it will have the merit of novelty.”

The Priapeia, in its Latin form Priapeia sine Diversoreun poetarum in Priapum Lusus, is a work that has long been well known to scholars, and in the 16th and 17th centuries editions were common.  The translation under consideration is entitled “Priapeia, or the Sportive Epigrams of divers Poets on Priapus:  the Latin text now for the first time Englished in verse and prose (the metrical version by Outidanos) [Good for Nothing], with Introduction, Notes, Explanatory and Illustrative and Excursus, by Neaniskos [a young man],” whose name, we need hardly say, is no secret.

The image of Priapus, the god of fruitfulness, was generally a grotesque figure made of rough wood painted red and carrying a gardener’s knife and a cornucopia.  Placed in a garden it was supposed to be a protection against thieves.  “In the earliest ages,” observes the writer of the preface, “the worship of the generative energy was of the most simple and artless character ... the homage of man to the Supreme Power, the Author of Life. ...  Afterwards the cult became depraved.  Religion became a pretext for libertinism.”  Poets wrote facetious and salacious epigrams and affixed them to the statues of the god—­even the greatest writers lending their pens to the “sport”—­and eventually some nonentity collected these scattered verses and made them into a book.  Everybody knows Catullus’s contribution, which begins: 

   “A log of oak, some rustic’s blade
    Hewed out my shape; grotesquely made
    I guard this spot by night and day,
    Scare every vagrant knave away,
    And save from theft and rapine’s hand
    My humble master’s cot and land.”

The chief complaint to be made against the writers of these verses is that they so rarely strayed from their subject.  The address entitled “A Word to the Reader,” is padded with citations from Burton’s Camoens and his Supplemental Nights, including the well-known passage concerning his estimate of a translator’s office,[FN#622] and the whole work bears evidence of extreme haste.  We are assured that it will be “most interesting to anthropologists and humanists.”

169.  Catullus and the Last Trip, July—­September 1890.