A HISTORY OF CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP. [To THE EDITOR OF THE
"SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—In the kind and generous notice of a work bearing the above title which appeared in the Spectator for January 9th the reviewer aptly draws attention to an interesting parallel between certain well-known lines by Herrick and the less familiar Latin couplet which the English poet doubtless had in view :— " Collige, virgo, roses, dum floe novus, et nova pubes ; Et memor esto Eevum sic properare tuum."
The reviewer clearly (and not unnaturally) regards the above couplet as the work of Ausonius. He will, I fear, be dis- appointed (and the scholarly readers of the Spectator will share his disappointment) when I state that the elegant poem of fifty lines, "De Rosie Nascentibus," beginning " Ver erat et blando," and ending with the couplet in question, is excluded from the genuine works of Ausonius in both of the best editions of that poet,—the edition by Peiper in the " Teubner Series" (1886, pp. lvi f., and 411), and that of Schenkl in the "Monuments Germaniae Histories" (1883, pp. xxxvi and 243). It once appeared (strangely enough) among the minor works of Virgil, but its authorship was temporarily transferred to Ausonius at the suggestion of Hieronymus Aleander, who, before leaving Paris for his appointment in the Vatican library in 1516, had noticed in the monastery of St. Victor an unimportant manuscript of miscellaneous poems, in which this particular poem was placed immediately after the genuine "Moselle" of Ausonius. Aleander's suggestion was accepted by Mariangelo Accorso of Aquila, the wan- dering scholar who wrote diatribes on Ausonius in Rome in 1524, and died at Breslau twenty years after. The modern traditional ascription of the lines to Ausonius was thus started. Herrick's " Hesperides " was published in 1648, and towards the end of an anonymous volume of "Selected Parts of Horace, Prince of Lyricks," printed in 1652, there appeared an English rendering of "a piece out of Ausonius," closing with the following lines :— " Gather your Roses, Virgins, whirst they'r new : For being past, no Spring returns to You."
In ascribing the lines to Ausonius, the translator doubtless followed some one of the old editions then current. Though we are now reluctantly compelled to surrender this tradition, the interest of the couplet, as a comparatively little known instance of one of the many points of contact between Latin and English literature, is really unimpaired by our ignorance of the author's name. We may, in fact, say of the poem "On the Rosebuds," once ascribed to the minor Latin poet Ausonius, what the greatest of English poets says of the rose :— "What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet."
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