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Canon 83In the end, however, Crusius bared only his moral refinement,concluding that the Latin texts should continue to be censored:Many things more might be brought to shew the allowableness ofthis practice among the Greeks as well as Romans; but as we think itin the highest degree criminal and offensive in itself, and of mostpernicious consequence to the Readers, especially the youth of bothsexes, into whose hands such pieces may happen to fall, we shall sayno more on this Head.(ibid.:29)The appearance of two complete translations of Catullus’s poetrywithin roughly a generation signalled a revision of the classicalcanon in English, the emergence of a new taste for short poems,mainly epigrams and lyrics, and especially those of an erotic nature.The cultural and social factors that made this revision possibleincluded, not any relaxation of bourgeois moral norms, but thecanonization of transparency in English poetry and poetrytranslation. Crusius had sounded this note early when he praised the“easy unaffected elegance and pleasantry that enlivens this Poet’sStyle” (Crusius 1733:28). By the beginning of the nineteenth century,Catullus’s poetry was routinely assimilated to transparent discourse,considered to offer an especially strong effect of authorial presence,and this occasionally weakened the critics’ prudery, leading them tomitigate the coarse language they found so offensive. The work ofrehabilitation was evident in Charles Abraham Elton’s Specimens ofthe Classic Poets (1814), a three-volume anthology of versetranslations from Greek and Latin. Elton felt that Catullus’s poetrywas rather thin—“pieces of gallantry or satirical epigrams, with afew poems of a more elevated cast”—but he excused this defect byassuming that “much of the poetry of Catullus appears to have beenlost” (Elton 1814:I, 30–31). What recommends the extant texts is their“ease” and “simplicity”:They, who turn with disgust from the coarse impurities that sully hispages, may be inclined to wonder, that the term of delicacy shouldever have been coupled with the name of Catullus. But to many ofhis effusions, distinguished both by fancy and feeling, this praise isjustly due. Many of his amatory trifles are quite unrivalled in theelegancy of their playfulness; and no author has excelled him in thepurity and neatness of his style, the delightful ease and racy