HORACE

BY

THEODORE MARTIN

From the Series Ancient Classics for English Readers

edited by

REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M. A. 

CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I. BIRTH. --EDUCATION. --CAMPAIGN WITH BRUTUS AND CASSIUS

CHAPTER II. RETURNS TO ROME AFTER BATTLE OF PHILIPPI. --EARLY POEMS

CHAPTER III. INTRODUCTION TO MAECENAS. --THE JOURNEY TO BRUNDUSIUM

CHAPTER IV. PUBLICATION OF FIRST BOOK OF SATIRES. --HIS FRIENDS. -- RECEIVES THE SABINE FARM FROM MAECENAS

CHAPTER V. LIFE IN ROME. --HORACE'S BORE. --EXTRAVAGANCE OF THE ROMAN DINNERS

CHAPTER VI. HORACE'S LOVE-POETRY

CHAPTER VII. HORACE'S POEMS TO HIS FRIENDS. --HIS PRAISES OF CONTENTMENT

CHAPTER VIII. PREVAILING BELIEF IN ASTROLOGY. --HORACE'S VIEWS OF A HEREAFTER. --RELATIONS WITH MAECENAS--BELIEF IN THE PERMANENCE OF HIS OWN FAME

CHAPTER IX. HORACE'S RELATIONS WITH AUGUSTUS--HIS LOVE OF INDEPENDENCE

CHAPTER X. DELICACY OF HORACE'S HEALTH. -HIS CHEERFULNESS--LOVE OF BOOKS. --HIS PHILOSOPHY PRACTICAL. --EPISTLE TO AUGUSTUS. --DEATH

PREFACE. 

No writer of antiquity has taken a stronger hold upon the modern mindthan Horace. The causes of this are manifold, but three may beespecially noted: his broad human sympathies, his vigorous common-sense, and his consummate mastery of expression. The mind must beeither singularly barren or singularly cold to which Horace does notspeak. The scholar, the statesman, the soldier, the man of the world, the town-bred man, the lover of the country, the thoughtful and thecareless, he who reads much, and he who reads little, all find in hispages more or less to amuse their fancy, to touch their feelings, toquicken their observation, to nerve their convictions, to put intohappy phrase the deductions of their experience. His poeticalsentiment is not pitched in too high a key for the unimaginative, butit is always so genuine that the most imaginative feel its charm. Hiswisdom is deeper than it seems, so simple, practical, and direct as itis in its application; and his moral teaching more spiritual andpenetrating than is apparent on a superficial study. He does not fallinto the common error of didactic writers, of laying upon life morethan it will bear; but he insists that it shall at least bear thefruits of integrity, truth, honour, justice, self-denial, andbrotherly charity. Over and above the mere literary charm of hisworks, too--and herein, perhaps, lies no small part of the secret ofhis popularity--the warm heart and thoroughly urbane nature of the manare felt instinctively by his readers, and draw them to him as to afriend. 

Hence it is that we find he has been a manual with men the mostdiverse in their natures, culture, and pursuits. Dante ranks him nextafter Homer. Montaigne, as might be expected, knows him by heart. Fenelon and Bossuet never weary of quoting him. La Fontaine polisheshis own exquisite style upon his model; and Voltaire calls him "thebest of preachers. " Hooker escapes with him to the fields to seekoblivion of a hard life, made harder by a shrewish spouse. LordChesterfield tells us, "When I talked my best I quoted Horace. " ToBoileau and to Wordsworth he is equally dear. Condorcet dies in hisdungeon with Horace open by his side; and in Gibbon's militia days, "on every march, " he says, "in every journey, Horace was always in mypocket, and often in my hand. " And as it has been, so it is. In many apocket, where this might be least expected, lies a well-thumbedHorace; and in many a devout Christian heart the maxims of the gentle, genial pagan find a place near the higher teachings of a greatermaster. 

Where so much of a writer's charm lies, as with Horace, in exquisiteaptness of language, and in a style perfect for fulness of suggestioncombined with brevity and grace, the task of indicating hischaracteristics in translation demands the most liberal allowance fromthe reader. In this volume the writer has gladly availed himself, where he might, of the privilege liberally accorded to him to use theadmirable translations of the late Mr Conington, which aredistinguished in all cases by the addition of his initial. The othertranslations are the writer's own. For these it would be superfluousto claim indulgence. This is sure to be granted by those who knowtheir Horace well. With those who do not, these translations will notbe wholly useless, if they serve to pique them into cultivating anacquaintance with the original sufficiently close to justify them inturning critics of their defects. 

QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS. 

BORN, A. U. C. 689, B. C. 65. DIED, A. U. C. 746, B. C. 8. 

CHAPTER I. 

BIRTH. --EDUCATION. --CAMPAIGN WITH BRUTUS AND CASSIUS. 

Like the two greatest lyrists of modern times, Burns and Béranger, Horace sprang from the ranks of the people. His father had been aslave, and he was himself cradled among "the huts where poor men lie. "Like these great lyrists, too, Horace was proud of his origin. Afterhe had become the intimate associate of the first men in Rome--nay, the bosom friend of the generals and statesmen who ruled the world--hewas at pains on more occasions than one to call attention to the factof his humble birth, and to let it be known that, had he to begin lifeanew, he was so far from desiring a better ancestry that he would, like Andrew Marvell, have made "his destiny his choice. " Nor is thisdone with the pretentious affectation of the parvenu, eager to bringunder notice the contrast between what he is and what he has been, andto insinuate his personal deserts, while pretending to disclaim them. Horace has no such false humility. He was proud, and he makes nosecret that he was so, of the name he had made, --proud of it forhimself and for the class from which, he had sprung. But it was hispractice, as well as his settled creed, to rate at little theaccidents of birth and fortune. A stronger and higher feeling, however, more probably dictated the avowal, --gratitude to that slave-born father whose character and careful training had stamped anabiding influence upon the life and genius of his son. Neither mighthe have been unwilling in this way quietly to protest against theworship of rank and wealth which he saw everywhere around him, andwhich was demoralising society in Rome. The favourite of the Emperor, the companion of Maecenas, did not himself forget, neither would helet others forget, that he was a freedman's son; and in his own waywas glad to declare, as Béranger did of himself at the height of hisfame, "Je suis vilain, et très vilain. "

The Roman poets of the pre-Augustan and Augustan periods, unlikeHorace, were all well born. Catullus and Calvus, his greatpredecessors in lyric poetry, were men of old and noble family Virgil, born five years before Horace, was the son of a Roman citizen of goodproperty. Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid, who were respectively six, fourteen, and twenty years his juniors, were all of equestrian rank. Horace's father was a freed-man of the town of Venusia, the modernVenosa. It is supposed that he had been a _publicus servus_, orslave of the community, and took his distinctive name from theHoratian tribe, to which the community belonged. He had saved amoderate competency in the vocation of _coactor_, a name appliedboth to the collectors of public revenue and of money at sales bypublic auction. To which of these classes he belonged is uncertain--most probably to the latter; and in those days of frequentconfiscations, when property was constantly changing hands, theprofits of his calling, at best a poor one, may have been unusuallylarge. With the fruits of his industry he had purchased a small farmnear Venusia, upon the banks of the Aufidus, the modern Ofanto, on theconfines of Lucania and Apulia, Here, on the 8th of December, B. C. 65, the poet was born; and this picturesque region of mountain, forest, and river, "meet nurse of a poetic child, " impressed itself indeliblyon his memory, and imbued him with the love of nature, especially inher rugged aspect, which remained with him through life. He appears tohave left the locality in early life, and never to have revisited it;but when he has occasion to describe its features (Odes, III. 4), hedoes this with a sharpness and truth of touch, which show how closelyhe had even then begun to observe. Acherontia, perched nest-like amongthe rocks, the Bantine thickets, the fat meadows of low-lyingForentum, which his boyish eye had noted, attest to this hour thevivid accuracy of his description. The passage in question records aninteresting incident in the poet's childhood. Escaping from his nurse, he has rambled away from the little cottage on the slopes of MountVultur, whither he had probably been taken from the sultry Venusia topass his _villeggiatura_ during the heat of summer, and is foundasleep, covered with fresh myrtle and laurel leaves, in which thewood-pigeons have swathed him. 

 "When from my nurse erewhile, on Vultur's steep, I stray'd beyond the bound Of our small homestead's ground, Was I, fatigued with play, beneath a heap Of fresh leaves sleeping found, --

 "Strewn by the storied doves; and wonder fell On all, their nest who keep On Acherontia's steep, Or in Forentum's low rich pastures dwell, Or Bantine woodlands deep, "That safe from bears and adders in such place I lay, and slumbering smiled, O'erstrewn with myrtle wild, And laurel, by the god's peculiar grace No craven-hearted child. "

The incident thus recorded is not necessarily discredited by thecircumstance of its being closely akin to what is told by Aelian ofPindar, that a swarm of bees settled upon his lips, and fed him withhoney, when he was left exposed upon the highway. It probably had somefoundation in fact, whatever may be thought of the implied augury ofthe special favour of the gods which is said to have been drawn fromit at the time. In any case, the picture of the strayed child, sleeping unconscious of its danger, with its hands full of wild-flowers, is pleasant to contemplate. 

In his father's house, and in those of the Apulian peasantry aroundhim, Horace became familiar with the simple virtues of the poor, theirindustry and independence, their integrity, chastity, and self-denial, which he loved to contrast in after years with the luxury and vice ofimperial Rome. His mother he would seem to have lost early. No mentionof her occurs, directly or indirectly, throughout his poems; andremarkable as Horace is for the warmth of his affections, this couldscarcely have happened had she not died when he was very young. Heappears also to have been an only child. This doubtless drew himcloser to his father, and the want of the early influences of motheror sister may serve to explain why one misses in his poetry somethingof that gracious tenderness towards womanhood, which, looking to thesweet and loving disposition of the man, one might otherwise haveexpected to find in it. That he was no common boy we may be very sure, even if this were not manifest from the fact that his father resolvedto give him a higher education than was to be obtained under aprovincial schoolmaster. With this view, although little able toafford the expense, he took his son, when about twelve years old, toRome, and gave him the best education the capital could supply. Nomoney was spared to enable him to keep his position among his fellow-scholars of the higher ranks. He was waited on by several slaves, asthough he were the heir to a considerable fortune. At the same time, however, he was not allowed either to feel any shame for his ownorder, or to aspire to a position which his patrimony was unable tomaintain. His father taught him to look forward to some situation akinto that in which his own modest competency had been acquired; and tofeel that, in any sphere, culture, self-respect, and prudent self-control must command influence, and afford the best guarantee forhappiness. In reading this part of Horace's story, as he tells ithimself, one is reminded of Burns's early lines about his father andhimself:--

 "My father was a farmer upon the Carrick border, And carefully he bred me up in decency and order. He bade me act a manly part, though I had ne'er a farthing, For without an honest manly heart no man was worth regarding. "

The parallel might be still further pursued. "My father, " says GilbertBurns, "was for some time almost the only companion we had. Heconversed familiarly on all subjects with us as if we had been men, and was at great pains, while we accompanied him in the labours of thefarm, to lead the conversation to such subjects as might tend toincrease our knowledge, or confirm us in virtuous habits. " How closelythis resembles the method adopted with Horace by his father will beseen hereafter. [Footnote: Compare it, too, with what Horace reportsof "Ofellus the hind, Though no scholar, a sage of exceptional kind, "in the Second Satire of the Second Book, from line 114 to the end. ]

Horace's literary master at Rome was Orbilius Pupillus, a grammarian, who had carried into his school his martinet habits as an old soldier;and who, thanks to Horace, has become a name (_plagosus Orbilius_, Orbilius of the birch) eagerly applied by many a suffering urchin tomodern pedagogues who have resorted to the same material means ofinculcating the beauties of the classics. By this Busby of the periodHorace was grounded in Greek, and made familiar, too familiar for hisliking, with Ennius, Naevius, Pacuvius, Attius, Livius Andronicus, andother early Latin writers, whose unpruned vigour was distasteful to onewho had already begun to appreciate the purer and not less vigorousstyle of Homer and other Greek authors. Horace's father took care thathe should acquire all the accomplishments of a Roman gentleman, inwhich music and rhetoric were, as a matter of course, included. But, what was of still more importance during this critical period of thefuture poet's first introduction to the seductions of the capital, heenjoyed the advantages of his father's personal superintendence andof a careful moral training. His father went with him to all his classes, and, being himself a man of shrewd observation and natural humour, he gave the boy's studies a practical bearing by directing his attentionto the follies and vices of the luxurious and dissolute society aroundhim, showing him how incompatible they were with the dictates ofreason and common-sense, and how disastrous in their consequences tothe good name and happiness of those who yielded to their seductions. The method he pursued is thus described by Horace (Satires, I. 4):--

 "Should then my humorous vein run wild, some latitude allow. I learned the habit from the best of fathers, who employed Some living type to stamp the vice he wished me to avoid. Thus temperate and frugal when exhorting me to be, And with the competence content which he had stored for me, 'Look, boy!' he'd say, ' at Albius' son--observe his sorry plight! And Barrus, that poor beggar there! Say, are not these a sight, To warn a man from squandering his patrimonial means?' When counselling me to keep from vile amours with common queans; 'Sectanus, ape him not!' he'd say; or, urging to forswear Intrigue with matrons, when I might taste lawful joys elsewhere; 'Trebonius' fame is blurred since he was in the manner caught. The reasons why this should be shunned, and why that should besought, The sages will explain; enough for me, if I uphold The faith and morals handed down from our good sires of old, And, while you need a guardian, keep your life pure and your name. When years have hardened, as they will, your judgment and yourframe, You'll swim without a float!' And so, with talk like this, he won And moulded me, while yet a boy. Was something to be done, Hard it might be--'For this, ' he'd say, 'good warrant you canquote'-- And then as model pointed to some public man of note. Or was there something to be shunned, then he would urge, 'Can you One moment doubt that acts like these are base and futile too, Which have to him and him such dire disgrace and trouble bred?' And as a neighbour's death appals the sick, and, by the dread Of dying, forces them to put upon their lusts restraint, So tender minds are oft deterred from vices by the taint They see them bring on others' names; 'tis thus that I from those Am all exempt, which bring with them a train of shames and woes. "

Nor did Horace only inherit from his father, as he here says, thekindly humour and practical good sense which distinguish his satiricaland didactic writings, and that manly independence which he preservedthrough the temptations of a difficult career. Many of "the ruggedmaxims hewn from life" with which his works abound are manifestly butechoes of what the poet had heard from his father's lips. Like his ownOfellus, and the elders of the race--not, let us hope, altogetherbygone--of peasant-farmers in Scotland, described by Wordsworth as"Religious men, who give to God and men their dues, "--the Apulianfreedman had a fund of homely wisdom at command, not gathered frombooks, but instinct with the freshness and force of direct observationand personal conviction. The following exquisite tribute by Horace tohis worth is conclusive evidence how often and how deeply he hadoccasion to be grateful, not only for the affectionate care of thisadmirable father, but also for the bias and strength which thatfather's character had given to his own. It has a further interest, asoccurring in a poem addressed to Maecenas, a man of ancient family andvast wealth, in the early days of that acquaintance with the poetwhich was afterwards to ripen into a lifelong friendship. 

 "Yet if some trivial faults, and these but few, My nature, else not much amiss, imbue (Just as you wish away, yet scarcely blame, A mole or two upon a comely frame), If no man may arraign me of the vice Of lewdness, meanness, nor of avarice; If pure and innocent I live, and dear To those I love (self-praise is venial here), All this I owe my father, who, though poor, Lord of some few lean acres, and no more, Was loath to send me to the village school, Whereto the sons of men of mark and rule, -- Centurions, and the like, --were wont to swarm, With slate and satchel on sinister arm, And the poor dole of scanty pence to pay The starveling teacher on the quarter-day; But boldly took me, when a boy, to Rome, There to be taught all arts that grace the home Of knight and senator. To see my dress, And slaves attending, you'd have thought, no less Than patrimonial fortunes old and great Had furnished forth the charges of my state. When with my tutors, he would still be by, Nor ever let me wander from his eye; And, in a word, he kept me chaste (and this Is virtue's crown) from all that was amiss, Nor such in act alone, but in repute, Till even scandal's tattling voice was mute. No dread had he that men might taunt or jeer, Should I, some future day, as auctioneer, Or, like himself, as tax-collector, seek With petty fees my humble means to eke. Nor should I then have murmured. Now I know, More earnest thanks, and loftier praise I owe. Reason must fail me, ere I cease to own With pride, that I have such a father known; Nor shall I stoop my birth to vindicate, By charging, like the herd, the wrong on Fate, That I was not of noble lineage sprung: Far other creed inspires my heart and tongue. For now should Nature bid all living men Retrace their years, and live them o'er again, Each culling, as his inclination bent, His parents for himself, with mine content, I would not choose whom men endow as great With the insignia and seats of state; And, though I seemed insane to vulgar eyes, Thou wouldst perchance esteem me truly wise, In thus refusing to assume the care Of irksome state I was unused to bear. "

The education, of which Horace's father had laid the foundation atRome, would not have been complete without a course of study atAthens, then the capital of literature and philosophy, as Rome was ofpolitical power. Thither Horace went somewhere between the age of 17and 20. "At Rome, " he says (Epistles, II. Ii. 23), "I had my schooling, and was taught Achilles' wrath, and all the woes it brought; At classic Athens, where I went ere long, I learned to draw the line 'twixt right and wrong, And search for truth, if so she might be seen, In Academic groves of blissful green. " (C. )

At Athens he found many young men of the leading Roman families--Bibulus, Messalla, Corvinus, the younger Cicero, and others--engagedin the same pursuits with himself, and he contracted among them manyenduring friendships. In the political lull which ensued between thebattle of Pharsalia (B. C. 48) and the death of Julius Caesar (B. C. 44), he was enabled to devote himself without interruption to thestudies which had drawn him to that home of literature and the arts. But these were destined before long to be rudely broken. The tidingsof that startling event had been hailed with delight by the youthfulspirits, some of whom saw in the downfall of the great Dictator thedawn of a new era of liberty, while others hoped from it the return topower of the aristocratic party to which they belonged. In this moodBrutus found them when he arrived in Athens along with Cassius, ontheir way to take command of the Eastern provinces which had beenassigned to them by the Senate. Cassius hurried on to his post inSyria, but Brutus lingered behind, ostensibly absorbed in thephilosophical studies of the schools, but at the same time recruitinga staff of officers for his army from among the young Romans of wealthand family whom it was important he should attach to his party, andwho were all eagerness to make his cause their own. Horace, infectedby the general enthusiasm, joined his standard; and, though then onlytwenty-two, without experience, and with no special aptitude, physicalor mental, for a military life, he was intrusted by Brutus with thecommand of a legion. There is no reason to suppose that he owed acommand of such importance to any dearth of men of good familyqualified to act as officers. It is, therefore, only reasonable toconclude, that even at this early period he was recognised in thebrilliant society around him as a man of mark; and that Brutus, beforeselecting him, had thoroughly satisfied himself that he possessedqualities which justified so great a deviation from ordinary rules, asthe commission of so responsible a charge to a freedman's son. ThatHorace gave his commander satisfaction we know from himself. The line(Epistles, I. Xx. 23), "_Me primis urbis belli placuissedomique_, "--

 "At home, as in the field, I made my way, And kept it, with the first men of the day, "--

can be read in no other sense. But while Horace had, beyond all doubt, made himself a strong party of friends who could appreciate his geniusand attractive qualities, his appointment as military tribune excitedjealousy among some of his brother officers, who considered that thecommand of a Roman legion should have been reserved for men of noblerblood--a jealousy at which he said, with his usual modesty, many yearsafterwards (Satires, I. Vi. 45), he had no reason either to besurprised or to complain. 

In B. C. 43, Brutus, with his army, passed from Macedonia to joinCassius in Asia Minor, and Horace took his part in their subsequentactive and brilliant campaign there. Of this we get some slightincidental glimpses in his works. Thus, for example (Odes, II. 7), wefind him reminding his comrade, Pompeius Varus, how

 "Full oft they sped the lingering day Quaffing bright wine, as in our tents we lay, With Syrian spikenard on our glistening hair. "

The Syrian spikenard, _Malobathrum Syrium_, fixes the locality. Again, in the epistle to his friend Bullatius (Epistles, I. 11), whois making a tour in Asia, Horace speaks of several places as if fromvivid recollection. In his usual dramatic manner, he makes Bullatiusanswer his inquiries as to how he likes the places he has seen:--

 "_You know what Lebedos is like_; so bare, With Gabii or Fidenae 'twould compare; Yet there, methinks, I would accept my lot, My friends forgetting, by my friends forgot, Stand on the cliff at distance, and survey The stormy sea-god's wild Titanic play. " (C. )

Horace himself had manifestly watched the angry surges from the cliffsof Lebedos. But a more interesting record of the Asiatic campaign, inasmuch as it is probably the earliest specimen of Horace's writingwhich we have, occurs in the Seventh Satire of the First Book. Persius, a rich trader of Clazomene, has a lawsuit with Rupilius, oneof Brutus's officers, who went by the nickname of "King. " Brutus, inhis character of quaestor, has to decide the dispute, which in thehands of the principals degenerates, as disputes so conductedgenerally do, into a personal squabble. Persius leads off with someoriental flattery of the general and his suite. Brutus is "Asia'ssun, " and they the "propitious stars, " all but Rupilius, who was

 "That pest, The Dog, whom husbandmen detest. "

Rupilius, an old hand at slang, replies with a volley of roughsarcasms, "such as among the vineyards fly, " and

 "Would make the passer-by Shout filthy names, but shouting fly"--

a description of vintage slang which is as true to-day as it was then. The conclusion is curious, as a punning allusion to the hereditaryfame of Brutus as a puller-down of kings, which it must have requiredsome courage to publish, when Augustus was omnipotent in Rome. 

 "But Grecian Persius, after he Had been besprinkled plenteously With gall Italic, cries, 'By all The gods above, on thee I call, Oh Brutus, thou of old renown, For putting kings completely down, To save us! Wherefore do you not Despatch this King here on the spot? One of the tasks is this, believe, Which you are destined to achieve!'"

This is just such a squib as a young fellow might be expected to dashoff for the amusement of his brother officers, while the incidentwhich led to it was yet fresh in their minds. Slight as it is, onefeels sure its preservation by so severe a critic of his own writingsas Horace was due to some charm of association, or possibly to thefact that in it he had made his first essay in satire. The defeat ofBrutus at Philippi (B. C. 42) brought Horace's military career to aclose. Even before this decisive event, his dream of the re-establishment of liberty and the old Roman constitution had probablybegun to fade away, under his actual experience of the true aims andmotives of the mass of those whom Brutus and Cassius had hitherto beenleading to victory, and satiating with plunder. Young aristocrats, whosneered at the freedman's son, were not likely to found any system ofliberty worthy of the name, or to use success for nobler purposes thanthose of selfish ambition. Fighting was not Horace's vocation, andwith the death of Brutus and those nobler spirits, who fell atPhilippi rather than survive their hopes of freedom, his motive forfighting was at an end. To prolong a contest which its leaders hadsurrendered in despair was hopeless. He did not, therefore, likePompeius Varus and others of his friends, join the party which, for atime, protracted the struggle under the younger Pompey. But, like hisgreat leader, he had fought for a principle; nor could he haveregarded otherwise than with horror the men who had overthrown Brutus, reeking as they were with the blood of a thousand proscriptions, andreckless as they had shown themselves of every civil right and socialobligation. As little, therefore, was he inclined to follow theexample of others of his distinguished friends and companions in arms, such as Valerius Messalla and Aelius Lamia, who not merely made theirpeace with Antony and Octavius, but cemented it by taking service intheir army. 

CHAPTER II. 

RETURNS TO ROME AFTER BATTLE OF PHILIPPI. --EARLY POEMS. 

Availing himself of the amnesty proclaimed by the conquerors, Horacefound his way back to Rome. His father was dead; how long before isnot known. If the little property at Venusia had remained unsold, itwas of course confiscated. When the lands of men, like Virgil, who hadtaken no active part in the political conflicts of the day, were beingseized to satisfy the rapacity of a mercenary soldiery, Horace'spaternal acres were not likely to escape. In Rome he found himselfpenniless. How to live was the question; and, fortunately forliterature, "chill penury" did not repress, but, on the contrary, stimulated his "noble rage. "

 "Bated in spirit, and with pinions clipped, Of all the means my father left me stripped, Want stared me in the face, so then and there I took to scribbling verse in sheer despair. "

Despoiled of his means, and smarting with defeat, Horace was just inthe state of mind to strike vigorously at men and manners which he didnot like. Young, ardent, constitutionally hot in temper, eager toassert, amid the general chaos of morals public and private, thehigher principles of the philosophic schools from which he had sorecently come, irritated by the thousand mortifications to which a manof cultivated tastes and keenly alive to beauty is exposed in aluxurious city, where the prizes he values most are carried off, yetscarcely valued, by the wealthy vulgar, he was especially open to thebesetting temptation of clever young men to write satire, and to writeit in a merciless spirit. As he says of himself (Odes, I. 15), "In youth's pleasant spring-time, The shafts of my passion at random I flung, And, dashing headlong into petulant rhyme, I recked neither where nor how fiercely I stung. "

Youth is always intolerant, and it is so easy to be severe; soseductive to say brilliant things, whether they be true or not. Butthere came a day, and it came soon, when Horace, saw that triumphsgained in this way were of little value, and when he was anxious thathis friends should join with him in consigning his smart and scurrillines (_celeres et criminosos Iambos_) to oblivion. The _amende_ forsome early lampoon which he makes in the Ode just quoted, thoughostensibly addressed to a lady who had been its victim, was probablyintended to cover a wider field. 

Personal satire is always popular, but the fame it begets is boughtdearly at the cost of lifelong enmities and many after-regrets. ThatHorace in his early writings was personal and abusive is very clear, both from his own language and from a few of the poems of this classand period which survive. Some of these have no value, except asshowing how badly even Horace could write, and how sedulously thebetter feeling and better taste of his riper years led him to avoidthat most worthless form of satire which attacks where rejoinder isimpossible, and irritates the temper but cannot possibly amend theheart. In others, the lash is applied with no less justice thanvigour, as in the following invective, the fourth of the Epodes:--

 "Such hate as nature meant to be 'Twixt lamb and wolf I feel for thee, Whose hide by Spanish scourge is tanned, And legs still bear the fetter's brand! Though of your gold you strut so vain, Wealth cannot change the knave in grain. How! see you not, when striding down The Via Sacra [1]in your gown Good six ells wide, the passers there Turn on you with indignant stare? 'This wretch, ' such gibes your ear invade, 'By the Triumvirs' [2] scourges flayed, Till even the crier shirked his toil, Some thousand acres ploughs of soil Falernian, and with his nags Wears out the Appian highway's flags; Nay, on the foremost seats, despite Of Otho, sits and apes the knight. What boots it to despatch a fleet So large, so heavy, so complete, Against a gang of rascal knaves, Thieves, corsairs, buccaneers, and slaves, If villain of such vulgar breed Is in the foremost rank to lead?'"

[1] The Sacred Way, leading to the Capitol, a favourite lounge. 

[2] When a slave was being scourged, under the orders of the Triumviri Capitales, a public crier stood by, and proclaimed the nature of his crime. 

Modern critics may differ as to whom this bitter infective was aimedat, but there could have been no doubt on that subject in Rome at thetime. And if, as there is every reason to conclude, it was levelled atSextus Menas, the lines, when first shown about among Horace'sfriends, must have told with great effect, and they were likely to beremembered long after the infamous career of this double-dyed traitorhad come to a close. Menas was a freedman of Pompey the Great, and atrusted officer of his son Sextus. [Footnote: Shakespeare hasintroduced him in "Antony and Cleopatra, " along with Menecrates andVarrius, as "friends to Sextus Pompeius. "] He had recently (B. C. 38)carried over with him to Augustus a portion of Pompey's fleet whichwas under his command, and betrayed into his hands the islands ofCorsica and Sardinia. For this act of treachery he was loaded withwealth and honours; and when Augustus, next year, fitted out a navalexpedition against Sextus Pompeius, Menas received a command. It wasprobably lucky for Horace that this swaggering upstart, who was notlikely to be scrupulous as to his means of revenge, went over the verynext year to his former master, whom he again abandoned within a yearto sell himself once more to Augustus. That astute politician put itout of his power to play further tricks with the fleet, by giving hima command in Pannonia, where he was killed, B. C. 36, at the siege ofSiscia, the modern Sissek. 

Though Horace was probably best known in Rome in these early days as awriter of lampoons and satirical poems, in which the bitterness of hismodels Archilochus and Lucilius was aimed at, not very successfully--for bitterness and personal rancour were not natural to the man--heshowed in other compositions signs of the true poetic spirit, whichafterwards found expression in the consummate grace and finish of hisOdes. To this class belongs the following poem (Epode 16), which, frominternal evidence, appears to have been written B. C. 40, when thestate of Italy, convulsed by civil war, was well calculated to fillhim with despair. Horace had frequent occasion between this period andthe battle of Actium, when the defeat and death of Antony closed thelong struggle for supremacy between him and Octavius, to appeal to hiscountrymen against the waste of the best blood of Italy in civil fray, which might have been better spent in subduing a foreign foe, andspreading the lustre of the Roman arms. But if we are to suppose thispoem written when the tidings of the bloody incidents of the Perusiancampaign had arrived in Rome, --the reduction of the town of Perusia byfamine, and the massacre of from two to three hundred prisoners, almost all of equestrian or senatorial rank, --we can well understandthe feeling under which the poem is written. 

TO THE ROMAN PEOPLE. 

 Another age in civil wars will soon be spent and worn, And by her native strength our Rome be wrecked and overborne, That Rome, the Marsians could not crush, who border on our lands, Nor the shock of threatening Porsena with his Etruscan bands, Nor Capua's strength that rivalled ours, nor Spartacus the stern, Nor the faithless Allobrogian, who still for change doth yearn. Ay, what Gennania's blue-eyed youth quelled not with ruthless sword, Nor Hannibal by our great sires detested and abhorred, We shall destroy with impious hands imbrued in brother's gore, And wild beasts of the wood shall range our native land once more. A foreign foe, alas! shall tread The City's ashes down, And his horse's ringing hoofs shall smite her places of renown, And the bones of great Quirinus, now religiously enshrined, Shall be flung by sacrilegious hands to the sunshine and the wind. And if ye all from ills so dire ask how yourselves to free, Or such at least as would not hold your lives unworthily, No better counsel can I urge, than that which erst inspired The stout Phocaeans when from their doomed city they retired, Their fields, their household gods, their shrines surrendering as aprey To the wild boar and the ravening wolf; [1] so we, in our dismay, Where'er our wandering steps may chance to carry us should go, Or wheresoe'er across the seas the fitful winds may blow. How think ye then? If better course none offer, why should we Not seize the happy auspices, and boldly put to sea? But let us swear this oath;--"Whene'er, if e'er shall come the time, Rocks upwards from the deep shall float, return shall not be crime; Nor we be loath to back our sails, the ports of home to seek, When the waters of the Po shall lave Matinum's rifted peak. Or skyey Apenninus down into the sea be rolled, Or wild unnatural desires such monstrous revel hold, That in the stag's endearments the tigress shall delight, And the turtle-dove adulterate with the falcon and the kite, That unsuspicious herds no more shall tawny lions fear, And the he-goat, smoothly sleek of skin, through the briny deepcareer!" This having sworn, and what beside may our returning stay, Straight let us all, this City's doomed inhabitants, away, Or those that rise above the herd, the few of nobler soul; The craven and the hopeless here on their ill-starred beds may loll. Ye who can feel and act like men, this woman's wail give o'er, And fly to regions far away beyond the Etruscan shore! The circling ocean waits us; then away, where nature smiles, To those fair lands, those blissful lands, the rich and happy Isles! Where Ceres year by year crowns all the untilled land with sheaves, And the vine with purple clusters droops, unpruned of all herleaves; Where the olive buds and burgeons, to its promise ne'er untrue, And the russet fig adorns the tree, that graffshoot never knew; Where honey from the hollow oaks doth ooze, and crystal rills Come dancing down with tinkling feet from the sky-dividing hills; There to the pails the she-goats come, without a master's word, And home with udders brimming broad returns the friendly herd. There round the fold no surly bear its midnight prowl doth make, Nor teems the rank and heaving soil with the adder and the snake; There no contagion smites the flocks, nor blight of any star With fury of remorseless heat the sweltering herds doth mar. Nor this the only bliss that waits us there, where drenching rains By watery Eurus swept along ne'er devastate the plains, Nor are the swelling seeds burnt up within the thirsty clods, So kindly blends the seasons there the King of all the Gods. That shore the Argonautic bark's stout rowers never gained, Nor the wily she of Colchis with step unchaste profaned; The sails of Sidon's galleys ne'er were wafted to that strand, Nor ever rested on its slopes Ulysses' toilworn band: For Jupiter, when he with brass the Golden Age alloyed, That blissful region set apart by the good to be enjoyed; With brass and then with iron he the ages seared, but ye, Good men and true, to that bright home arise and follow me!

[1] The story of the Phocaeans is told by Herodotus (Ch. 165). When their city was attacked by Harpagus, they retired in a body to make way for the Persians, who took possession of it. They subsequently returned, and put to the sword the Persian garrison which had been left in it by Harpagus. "Afterwards, when this was accomplished, they pronounced terrible imprecations on any who should desert the fleet; besides this, they sunk a mass of molten iron, and swore that they would never return to Phocaea until it should appear again. "

This poem, Lord Lytton has truly said, "has the character of youth inits defects and its beauties. The redundance of its descriptivepassages is in marked contrast to the terseness of description whichHorace studies in his Odes; and there is something declamatory in itsgeneral tone which is at variance with the simpler utterance oflyrical art. On the other hand, it has all the warmth of genuinepassion, and in sheer vigour of composition Horace has rarely excelledit. "

The idea of the Happy Isles, referred to in the poem, was a familiarone with the Greek poets. They became in time confounded with theElysian fields, in which the spirits of the departed good and greatenjoyed perpetual rest. It is as such that Ulysses mentions them inTennyson's noble monologue:--

 "It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down, It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. "

These islands were supposed to be in the far west, and were probablythe poetical amplification of some voyager's account of the Canariesor of Madeira. There has always been a region beyond the boundaries ofcivilisation to which the poet's fancy has turned for ideal happinessand peace. The difference between ancient and modern is, that materialcomforts, as in this epode, enter largely into the dream of theancient, while independence, beauty, and grandeur are the chiefelements in the modern picture:--

 "Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, Breadth of Tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise. Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag, Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, droops the trailer from thecrag; Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree, Summer Isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea. "

To the same class of Horace's early poems, though probably a few yearslater in date, belongs the following eulogium of a country life andits innocent enjoyments (Epode 2), the leading idea of which wasembodied by Pope in the familiar lines, wonderful for finish as theproduction of a boy of eleven, beginning

 "Happy the man whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound. "

With characteristic irony Horace puts his fancies into the mouth ofAlphius, a miserly money-lender. No one yearns so keenly for thecountry and its imagined peace as the overworked city man, when hispulse is low and his spirits weary with bad air and the reaction ofover-excitement; no one, as a rule, is more apt to tire of the homelyand uneventful life which the country offers, or to find that, for himat least, its quietude does not bring peace. It is not, therefore, atall out of keeping, although critics have taken exception to the poemon this ground, that Horace makes Alphius rhapsodise on the charms ofa rural life, and having tried them, creep back within the year to hismoneybags and his ten per cent. It was, besides, a favourite doctrinewith him, which he is constantly enforcing in his later works, thateverybody envies his neighbour's pursuits--until he tries them. 

ALPHIUS. 

 Happy the man, in busy schemes unskilled, Who, living simply, like our sires of old, Tills the few acres, which his father tilled, Vexed by no thoughts of usury or gold;

 The shrilling clarion ne'er his slumber mars, Nor quails he at the howl of angry seas; He shuns the forum, with its wordy jars, Nor at a great man's door consents to freeze. 

 The tender vine-shoots, budding into life, He with the stately poplar-tree doth wed, Lopping the fruitless branches with his knife, And grafting shoots of promise in their stead;

 Or in some valley, up among the hills, Watches his wandering herds of lowing kine, Or fragrant jars with liquid honey fills, Or shears his silly sheep in sunny shine;

 Or when Autumnus o'er the smiling land Lifts up his head with rosy apples crowned, Joyful he plucks the pears, which erst his hand Graffed on the stem they're weighing to the ground;

 Plucks grapes in noble clusters purple-dyed, A gift for thee, Priapus, and for thee, Father Sylvanus, where thou dost preside, Warding his bounds beneath thy sacred tree. 

 Now he may stretch his careless limbs to rest, Where some old ilex spreads its sacred roof; Now in the sunshine lie, as likes him best, On grassy turf of close elastic woof. 

 And streams the while glide on with murmurs low, And birds are singing 'mong the thickets deep, And fountains babble, sparkling as they flow, And with their noise invite to gentle sleep. 

 But when grim winter comes, and o'er his grounds Scatters its biting snows with angry roar, He takes the field, and with a cry of hounds Hunts down into the toils the foaming boar;

 Or seeks the thrush, poor starveling, to ensnare, In filmy net with bait delusive stored, Entraps the travelled crane, and timorous hare, Rare dainties these to glad his frugal board. 

 Who amid joys like these would not forget The pangs which love to all its victims bears, The fever of the brain, the ceaseless fret, And all the heart's lamentings and despairs?

 But if a chaste and blooming wife, beside, The cheerful home with sweet young blossoms fills, Like some stout Sabine, or the sunburnt bride Of the lithe peasant of the Apulian hills, Who piles the hearth with logs well dried and old Against the coming of her wearied lord, And, when at eve the cattle seek the fold, Drains their full udders of the milky hoard;

 And bringing forth from her well-tended store A jar of wine, the vintage of the year, Spreads an unpurchased feast, --oh then, not more Could choicest Lucrine oysters give me cheer, Or the rich turbot, or the dainty char, If ever to our bays the winter's blast Should drive them in its fury from afar; Nor were to me a welcomer repast

 The Afric hen or the Ionic snipe, Than olives newly gathered from the tree, That hangs abroad its clusters rich and ripe, Or sorrel, that doth love the pleasant lea, Or mallows wholesome for the body's need, Or lamb foredoomed upon some festal day In offering to the guardian gods to bleed, Or kidling which the wolf hath marked for prey. 

 What joy, amidst such feasts, to see the sheep, Full of the pasture, hurrying homewards come; To see the wearied oxen, as they creep, Dragging the upturned ploughshare slowly home!

 Or, ranged around the bright and blazing hearth, To see the hinds, a house's surest wealth, Beguile the evening with their simple mirth, And all the cheerfulness of rosy health!

 Thus spake the miser Alphius; and, bent Upon a country life, called in amain The money he at usury had lent;-- But ere the month was out, 'twas lent again. 

In this charming sketch of the peasant's life it is easy to see thatHorace is drawing from nature, like Burns in his more elaboratepicture of the "Cottar's Saturday Night. " Horace had obviously watchedclosely the ways of the peasantry round his Apulian home, as he did ata later date those of the Sabine country, and to this we owe many ofthe most delightful passages in his works. He omits no opportunity ofcontrasting their purity of morals, and the austere self-denial oftheir life, with the luxurious habits and reckless vice of the citylife of Rome. Thus, in one of the finest of his Odes (Book III. 6), after painting with a few masterly strokes what the matrons and thefast young ladies of the imperial city had become, it was not fromsuch as these, he continues, that the noble youth sprang "who dyed theseas with Carthaginian gore, overthrew Pyrrhus and great Antiochus anddireful Hannibal, " concluding in words which contrast by theirsuggestive terseness at the same time that they suggest comparisonwith the elaborated fulness of the epode just quoted:--

 "But they, of rustic warriors wight The manly offspring, learned to smite The soil with Sabine spade, And faggots they had cut, to bear Home from the forest, whensoe'er An austere mother bade;

 "What time the sun began to change The shadows through the mountain range, And took the yoke away From the o'erwearied oxen, and His parting car proclaimed at hand The kindliest hour of day. "

Another of Horace's juvenile poems, unique in subject and in treatment(Epode 5), gives evidence of a picturesque power of the highest kind, stimulating the imagination, and swaying it with the feelings of pityand terror in a way to make us regret that he wrote no others in asimilar vein. We find ourselves at midnight in the gardens of thesorceress Canidia, whither a boy of good family--his rank beingclearly indicated by the reference to his purple _toga_ and_bulla_--has been carried off from his home. His terrifiedexclamations, with which the poem opens, as Canidia and her threeassistants surround him, glaring on him, with looks significant oftheir deadly purpose, through lurid flames fed with the usual ghastlyingredients of a witch's fire, carry us at once into the horrors ofthe scene. While one of the hags sprinkles her hell-drops through theadjoining house, another is casting up earth from a pit, in which theboy is presently imbedded to the chin, and killed by a frightfulprocess of slow torture, in order that a love philtre of irresistiblepower may be concocted from his liver and spleen. The time, the place, the actors are brought before us with singular dramatic power. Canidia's burst of wonder and rage that the spells she deemed all-powerful have been counteracted by some sorceress of skill superior toher own, gives great reality to the scene; and the curses of the dyingboy, launched with tragic vigour, and closing with a touch ofbeautiful pathos, bring it to an effective close. 

The speculations as to who and what Canidia was, in which scholarshave run riot, are conspicuous for absurdity, even among the wild andridiculous conjectures as to the personages named by Horace in whichthe commentators have indulged. That some well-known person was theoriginal of Canidia is extremely probable, for professors ofwitchcraft abounded at the time, combining very frequently, like theirmodern successors, the arts of Medea with the attributes of DameQuickly. What more natural than for a young poet to work up aneffective picture out of the abundant suggestions which the currentstories of such creatures and their doings presented to his hand? Thepopular belief in their power, the picturesque conditions under whichtheir spells were wrought, the wild passions in which lay the secretof their hold upon the credulity of their victims, offered to theRoman poet, just as they did to our own Elizabethan dramatists, acombination of materials most favourable for poetic treatment. Butthat Horace had, as many of his critics contend, a feeling of personalvanity, the pique of a discarded lover, to avenge, is an assumptionwholly without warrant. He was the last man, at any time or under anycircumstances, to have had any relations of a personal nature with awoman of Canidia's class. However inclined he may have been to use herand her practices for poetic purposes, he manifestly not only sawthrough the absurdity of her pretensions, but laughed at her miserableimpotence, and meant that others should do the same. It seems to beimpossible to read the 8th of his First Book of his Satires, and notcome to this conclusion. That satire consists of the monologue of agarden god, set up in the garden which Maecenas had begun to lay outon the Esquiline Hill. This spot had until recently been the burial-ground of the Roman poor, a quarter noisome by day, and the haunt ofthieves and beasts of prey by night. On this obscene spot, litteredwith skulls and dead men's bones, Canidia and her accomplice Saganaare again introduced, digging a pit with their nails, into which theypour the blood of a coal-black ewe, which they had previously tornlimb-meal, "So to evoke the shade and soul Of dead men, and from these to wring Responses to their questioning. "

They have with them two effigies, one of wax and the other of wool--the latter the larger of the two, and overbearing the other, whichcowers before it, "Like one that stands Beseeching in the hangman's hands. On Hecate one, Tisiphone The other calls; and you might see Serpents and hell-hounds thread the dark, Whilst, these vile orgies not to mark, The moon, all bloody red of hue, Behind the massive tombs withdrew. "

The hags pursue their incantations; higher and higher flames theirghastly fire, and the grizzled wolves and spotted snakes slink interror to their holes, as the shrieks and muttered spells of thebeldams make the moon-forsaken night more hideous. But after piling uphis horrors with the most elaborate skill, as if in the view of someterrible climax, the poet makes them collapse into utter farce. Disgusted by their intrusion on his privacy, the Priapus adopts asimple but exceedingly vulgar expedient to alarm these appalling hags. In an instant they fall into the most abject terror, suspend theirincantations, and, tucking up their skirts, make off for the morecomfortable quarters of the city as fast as their trembling limbs cancarry them--Canidia, the great enchantress, dropping her false teeth, and her attendant Sagana parting company with her wig, by the way:--

 "While you With laughter long and loud might view Their herbs, and charmed adders wound In mystic coils, bestrew the ground. "

And yet grave scholars gravely ask us to believe that Canidia was anold mistress of the poet's! These poems evidently made a success, andHorace returned to the theme in his 17th Epode. Here he writes asthough he had been put under a spell by Canidia, in revenge for hisformer calumnies about her. 

 "My youth has fled, my rosy hue Turned to a wan and livid blue; Blanched by thy mixtures is my hair; No respite have I from despair. The days and nights, they wax and wane, Yet bring me no release from pain; Nor can I ease, howe'er I gasp, The spasm, which holds me in its grasp. "

Here we have all the well-known symptoms of a man under a malignmagical influence. In this extremity Horace affects to recant all themischief he has formerly spoken of the enchantress. Let her name whatpenance he will, he is ready to perform it. If a hundred steers willappease her wrath, they are hers; or if she prefers to be sung of asthe chaste and good, and to range above the spheres as a golden star, his lyre is at her service. Her parentage is as unexceptionable as herlife is pure, but while ostentatiously disclaiming his libels, thepoet takes care to insinuate them anew, by apostrophising her inconclusion, thus:--

 "Thou who dost ne'er in haglike wont Among the tombs of paupers hunt For ashes newly laid in ground, Love-charms and philtres to compound, Thy heart is gentle, pure thy hands. "

Of course, Canidia is not mollified by such a recantation as this. Theman who, "Branding her name with ill renown, Made her the talk of all the town, "

is not so lightly to be forgiven. 

 "You'd have a speedy doom? But no, It shall be lingering, sharp, and slow. "

The pangs of Tantalus, of Prometheus, or of Sisyphus are but the typesof what his shall be. Let him try to hang, drown, stab himself--hisefforts will be vain:--

 "Then comes my hour of triumph, then I'll goad you till you writhe again; Then shall you curse the evil hour You made a mockery of my power. "

She then triumphantly reasserts the powers to which she lays claim. What! I, she exclaims, who can waste life as the waxen image of myvictim melts before my magic fire [Footnote: Thus Hecate inMiddleton's "Witch" assures to the Duchess of Glo'ster "a sudden andsubtle death" to her victim:--]--I, who can bring down the moon fromher sphere, evoke the dead from their ashes, and turn the affectionsby my philtres, --

 "Shall I my potent art bemoan As impotent 'gainst thee alone?"

Surely all this is as purely the work of imagination as Middleton's"Witch, " or the Hags in "Macbeth, " or in Goethe's 'Faust. ' Horace usedCanidia as a byword for all that was hateful in the creatures of hercraft, filthy as they were in their lives and odious in their persons. His literary and other friends were as familiar with her name in thissense as we are with those of Squeers and Micawber, as types of aclass; and the joke was well understood when, many years after, in the8th of his Second Book of Satires, he said that Nasidienus's dinner-party broke up without their eating a morsel of the dishes after acertain point, --"As if a pestilential blast from Canidia's throat, more venomous than that of African vipers, had swept across them. "

 "His picture made in wax, and gently molten By a blue fire, kindled with dead men's eyes, Will waste him by degrees. "--

An old delusion. We find it in Theocritus, where a girl, forsaken byher lover, resorts to the same desperate restorative (Idylls ii. 28)--

 "As this image of wax I melt here by aidance demonic, Myndian Delphis shall so melt with love's passion anon. "

Again Ovid (Heroides vi. 91) makes Hypsipyle say of Medea:

 "The absent she binds with her spells, and figures of wax shedevises, And in their agonised spleen fine-pointed needles she thrusts. "

CHAPTER III. 

INTRODUCTION TO MAECENAS. --THE JOURNEY TO BRUNDUSIUM. 

Horace had not been long in Rome, after his return from Greece, beforehe had made himself a name. With what he got from the booksellers, orpossibly by the help of friends, he had purchased a patent place inthe Quaestor's department, a sort of clerkship of the Treasury, whichhe continued to hold for many years, if not indeed to the close of hislife. The duties were light, but they demanded, and at all events had, his occasional attention, even after he was otherwise provided for. Being his own--bought by his own money--it may have gratified his loveof independence to feel that, if the worst came to the worst, he hadhis official salary to fall back upon. Among his friends, men ofletters are at this time, as might have been expected, found to bemost conspicuous. Virgil, who had recently been despoiled, like, himself, of his paternal property, took occasion to bring his namebefore Maecenas, the confidential adviser and minister of Octavius, inwhom he had himself found a helpful friend. This was followed up bythe commendation of Varius, already celebrated as a writer of Epicpoetry, and whose tragedy of "Thyestes, " if we are to trustQuintilian, was not unworthy to rank with the best tragedies ofGreece. Maecenas may not at first have been too well disposed towardsa follower of the republican party, who had not been sparing of hissatire against many of the supporters and favourites of Octavius. Hesent for Horace, however (B. C. 39), and any prejudice on this score, if prejudice there was, was ultimately got over. Maecenas took time toform his estimate of the man, and it was not till nine months aftertheir first interview that he sent for Horace again. When he did so, however, it was to ask him to consider himself for the future amongthe number of his friends. This part of Horace's story is told withadmirable brevity and good feeling in the Satire from which we havealready quoted, addressed to Maecenas (B. I. Sat. 6) a few yearsafterwards. 

 "Lucky I will not call myself, as though Thy friendship I to mere good fortune owe. No chance it was secured me thy regards, But Virgil first, that best of men and bards, And then kind Varius mentioned what I was. Before you brought, with many a faltering pause, Dropping some few brief words (for bashfulness Robbed me of utterance) I did not profess That I was sprung of lineage old and great, Or used to canter round my own estate On Satureian barb, but what and who I was as plainly told. As usual, you Brief answer make me. I retire, and then, Some nine months after, summoning me again, You bid me 'mongst your friends assume a place: And proud I feel that thus I won your grace, Not by an ancestry long known to fame, But by my life, and heart devoid of blame. "

The name of Maecenas is from this time inseparably associated withthat of Horace. From what little is authentically known of him, thismuch may be gathered: He was a man of great general accomplishment, well versed in the literature both of Greece and Rome, devoted toliterature and the society of men of letters, a lover of the fine artsand of natural history, a connoisseur of gems and precious stones, fond of living in a grand style, and of surrounding himself withpeople who amused him, without being always very particular as to whoor what they were. For the indulgence of all these tastes, his greatwealth was more than sufficient. He reclaimed the Esquiline hill frombeing the public nuisance we have already described, laid it out ingardens, and in the midst of these built himself a sumptuous palace, where the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore now stands, from which hecommanded a superb view of the country looking towards Tivoli. To thispalace, salubrious from its spacious size and the elevation of itssite, Augustus, when ill, had himself carried from his own modestmansion; and from its lofty belvedere tower Nero is said to haveenjoyed the spectacle of Rome in flames beneath him. Voluptuary anddilettante as Maecenas was, he was nevertheless, like most men of asombre and melancholy temperament, capable of great exertions; and heveiled under a cold exterior and reserved manners a habit of acuteobservation, a kind heart, and, in matters of public concern, aresolute will. This latent energy of character, supported as it was bya subtle knowledge of mankind and a statesmanlike breadth of view, contributed in no small degree to the ultimate triumph of OctaviusCaesar over his rivals, and to the successful establishment of theempire in his hands. When the news of Julius Caesar's assassinationreached the young Octavius, then only nineteen, in Apollonia, it hasbeen said that Maecenas was in attendance upon him as his governor ortutor. Be this so or not, as soon as Octavius appears in the politicalarena as his uncle's avenger, Maecenas is found by his side. Inseveral most important negotiations he acted as his representative. Thus (B. C. 40), the year before Horace was introduced to him, he, along with Cocceius Nerva, negotiated with Antony the peace ofBrundusium, which resulted in Antony's ill-starred marriage withCaesar's sister Octavia. Two years later he was again associated withCocceius in a similar task, on which occasion Horace and Virgilaccompanied him to Brundusium. He appears to have commanded in variousexpeditions, both naval and military, but it was at Rome and inCouncil that his services were chiefly sought; and he acted as one ofthe chief advisers of Augustus down to about five years before hisdeath, when, either from ill health or some other unknown cause, heabandoned political life. More than once he was charged by Augustuswith the administration of the civil affairs of Italy during his ownabsence, intrusted with his seal, and empowered to open all hisletters addressed to the Senate, and, if necessary, to alter theircontents, so as to adapt them to the condition of affairs at home. Hisaim, like that of Vipsanius Agrippa, who was in himself the Nelson andWellington of the age, seems to have been to build up a united andflourishing empire in the person of Augustus. Whether from temperamentor policy, or both, he set his face against the system of cruelty andextermination which disgraced the triumvirate. When Octavius was oneday condemning man after man to death, Maecenas, after a vain attemptto reach him on the tribunal, where he sat surrounded by a densecrowd, wrote upon his tablets, _Surge tandem, Carnifex_!--"Butcher, break off!" and flung them across the crowd into the lap ofCaesar, who felt the rebuke, and immediately quitted the judgment-seat. His policy was that of conciliation; and while bent on theestablishment of a monarchy, from what we must fairly assume to havebeen a patriotic conviction that this form of government could alonemeet the exigencies of the time, he endeavoured to combine this with adue regard to individual liberty, and a free expression of individualopinion. 

At the time of Horace's introduction to him, Maecenas was probably athis best, in the full vigour of his intellect, and alive with thegenerous emotions which must have animated a man bent as he was onsecuring tranquillity for the state, and healing the strife offactions, which were threatening it with ruin. His chief relaxationfrom the fatigues of public life was, to all appearance, found in thesociety of men of letters, and, judging by what Horace says (Satires, I. 9), the _vie intime_ of his social circle must have beencharming. To be admitted within it was a privilege eagerly coveted, and with good reason, for not only was this in itself a stamp ofdistinction, but his parties were well known as the pleasantest inRome:--

 "No house more free from all that's base, In none cabals more out of place. It hurts me not, if others be More rich, or better read than me; Each has his place. "

Like many of his contemporaries, who were eminent in political life, Maecenas devoted himself to active literary work--for he wrote much, and on a variety of topics. His taste in literature was, however, better than his execution. His style was diffuse, affected, andobscure; but Seneca, who tells us this, and gives some examples whichjustify the criticism, tells us at the same time that his genius wasmassive and masculine (_grande et virile_), and that he wouldhave been eminent for eloquence, if fortune had not spoiled him. However vicious his own style may have been, the man who encouragedthree such writers as Virgil, Propertius, and Horace, not to mentionothers of great repute, whose works have perished, was clearly a soundjudge of a good style in others. 

As years went on, and the cares of public life grew less onerous, habits of self-indulgence appear to have grown upon Maecenas. It willprobably be well, however, to accept with some reserve what has beensaid against him on this head. Then, as now, men of rank and powerwere the victims of calumnious gossips and slanderous pamphleteers. His health became precarious. Incessant sleeplessness spoke of anovertasked brain and shattered nerves. Life was full of pain; still heclung to it with a craven-like tenacity. So, at least, Seneca asserts, quoting in support of his statement some very bad verses by Maecenas, which may be thus translated:--

 "Lame in feet, and lame in fingers, Crooked in back, with every tooth Rattling in my head, yet, 'sooth, I'm content, so life but lingers. Gnaw my withers, rack my bones, Life, mere life, for all atones. "

In one view these lines may certainly be construed to import the samesentiment as the speech of the miserable Claudio in "Measure forMeasure, "--

 "The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death. "

But, on the other hand, they may quite as fairly be regarded as merelygiving expression to the tenet of the Epicurean philosophy, thathowever much we may suffer from physical pain or inconvenience, it isstill possible to be happy. "We know what we are; we know not what wemay be!"

Not the least misfortune of Maecenas was his marriage to a woman whomhe could neither live with nor without--separating from and returningto her so often, that, according to Seneca, he was a thousand timesmarried, yet never had but one wife. Friends he had many, loyal anddevoted friends, on whose society and sympathy he leant more and moreas the years wore on. He rarely stirred from Rome, loving its smoke, its thronged and noisy streets, its whirl of human passions, asJohnson loved Fleet Street, or "the sweet shady side of Pall Mall, "better than all the verdure of Tivoli, or the soft airs and exquisitescenery of Baiae. He liked to read of these things, however; and mayhave found as keen a pleasure in the scenery of the 'Georgics, ' or inHorace's little landscape-pictures, as most men could have extractedfrom the scenes which they describe. 

Such was the man, ushered into whose presence, Horace, the recklesslampooner and satirist, found himself embarrassed, and at a loss forwords. Horace was not of the MacSycophant class, who cannot "keeptheir back straight in the presence of a great man;" nor do we thinkhe had much of the nervous apprehensiveness of the poetic temperament. Why, then, should he have felt thus abashed? Partly, it may have been, from natural diffidence at encountering a man to gain whose goodwillwas a matter of no small importance, but whose goodwill, he also knewby report, was not easily won; and partly, to find himself face toface with one so conspicuously identified with the cause against whichhe had fought, and the men whom he had hitherto had every reason todetest. 

Once admitted by Maecenas to the inner circle of his friends, Horacemade his way there rapidly. Thus we find him, a few months afterwards, in the spring of B. C. 37, going to Brundusium with Maecenas, who hadbeen despatched thither on a mission of great public importance(Satires, I. 6). The first term of the triumvirate of Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus had expired at the close of the previous year. No fresh arrangement had been made, and Antony, alarmed at the growingpower of Octavius in Italy, had appeared off Brundusium with a fleetof 300 sail and a strong body of troops. The Brundusians--on a hint, probably, from Octavius--forbade his landing, and he had to go on toTarentum, where terms were ultimately arranged for a renewal of thetriumvirate. The moment was a critical one, for an open rupturebetween Octavius and Antony was imminent, which might well have proveddisastrous to the former, had Antony joined his fleet to that of theyounger Pompey, which, without his aid, had already proved more than amatch for the naval force of Octavius. 

To judge by Horace's narrative, all the friends who accompaniedMaecenas on this occasion, except his coadjutor, Cocceius Nerva, whohad three years before been engaged with him on a similar mission toBrundusium, were men whose thoughts were given more to literature thanto politics. Horace starts from Rome with Heliodorus, a celebratedrhetorician, and they make their way very leisurely to Anxur(Terracina), where they are overtaken by Maecenas. 

 "'Twas fixed that we should meet with dear Maecenas and Cocceius here, Who were upon a mission bound, Of consequence the most profound; For who so skilled the feuds to close Of those, once friends, who now were foes?"

This is the only allusion throughout the poem, to the object of thejourney. The previous day, Horace had been baulked of his dinner, thewater being so bad, and his stomach so delicate, that he chose to fastrather than run the risk of making himself ill with it. And now atTerracina he found his eyes, which were weak, so troublesome, that hehad to dose them well with a black wash. These are the firstindications we get of habitual delicacy of health, which, if not duealtogether to the fatigues and exposure of his campaign with Brutus, had probably been increased by them. 

 "Meanwhile beloved Maecenas came, Cocceius too, and brought with them Fonteius Capito, a man Endowed with every grace that can A perfect gentleman attend, And Antony's especial friend. "

They push on next day to Formiae, and are amused at Fundi (Fondi) onthe way by the consequential airs of the prefect of the place. Itwould seem as if the peacock nature must break out the moment a manbecomes a prefect or a mayor. 

 "There having rested for the night, With inexpressible delight We hail the dawn, --for we that day At Sinuessa, on our way With Plotius, [1] Virgil, Varius too, Have an appointed rendezvous; Souls all, than whom the earth ne'er saw More noble, more exempt from flaw, Nor are there any on its round To whom I am more firmly bound. Oh! what embracings, and what mirth! Nothing, no, nothing, on this earth, Whilst I have reason, shall I e'er With a true genial friend compare!"

[1] Plotius Tucca, himself a poet, and associated by Virgil with Varius in editing the Aeneid after the poet's death. 

Next day they reach Capua, where, so soon as their mules are unpacked, away

 "Maecenas hies, at ball to play; To sleep myself and Virgil go, For tennis-practice is, we know, Injurious, quite beyond all question, Both to weak eyes and weak digestion. "

With these and suchlike details Horace carries us pleasantly on withhis party to Brundusium. They were manifestly in no hurry, for theytook fourteen days, according to Gibbon's careful estimate, to travel378 Roman miles. That they might have got over the ground much faster, if necessary, is certain from what is known of other journeys. Caesarposted 100 miles a-day. Tiberius travelled 200 miles in twenty-fourhours, when he was hastening to close the eyes of his brother Drusus;and Statius (Sylv. 14, Carm. 3) talks of a man leaving Rome in themorning, and being at Baiae or Puteoli, 127 miles off, before night. 

 "Have but the will, be sure you'll find the way. What shall stop him, who starts at break of day From sleeping Rome, and on the Lucrine sails Before the sunshine into twilight pales?"

Just as, according to Sydney Smith, in his famous allusion to thetriumphs of railway travelling, "the early Scotchman scratches himselfin the morning mists of the North, and has his porridge in Piccadillybefore the setting sun. "

Horace treats the expedition to Brundusium entirely as if it had beena pleasant tour. Gibbon thinks he may have done so purposely, toconvince those who were jealous of his intimacy with the greatstatesman, "that his thoughts and occupations on the event were farfrom being of a serious or political nature. " But it was a rule withHorace, in all his writings, never to indicate, by the slightest word, that he knew any of the political secrets which, as the intimatefriend of Maecenas, he could scarcely have failed to know. He hatedbabbling of all kinds. A man who reported the private talk of friends, even on comparatively indifferent topics, --

 "The churl, who out of doors will spread What 'mongst familiar friends is said, "--

(Epistle I. V. 24), was his especial aversion; and he has more thanonce said, only not in such formal phrase, what Milton puts into themouth of his "Samson Agonistes, "

 "To have revealed Secrets of men, the secrets of a friend, How heinous had the fact been! how deserving Contempt, and scorn of all, to be excluded All friendship, and avoided as a blab, The mark of fool set on his front!"

Moreover, reticence, the indispensable quality, not of statesmenmerely, but of their intimates, was not so rare a virtue in these daysas in our own; and as none would have expected Horace, in a poem ofthis kind, to make any political confidences, he can scarcely besupposed to have written it with any view to throwing the gossips ofRome off the scent. The excursion had been a pleasant one, and hethought its incidents worth noting. Hence the poem. Happily for us, who get from it most interesting glimpses of some of the familiaraspects of Roman life and manners, of which we should otherwise haveknown nothing. Here, for example, is a sketch of how people fared intravelling by canal in those days, near Rome. Overcrowding, we see, isnot an evil peculiar to our own days. 

 "Now 'gan the night with gentle hand To fold in shadows all the land, And stars along the sky to scatter, When there arose a hideous clatter, Slaves slanging bargemen, bargemen slaves; 'Ho, haul up here! how now, ye knaves, Inside three hundred people stuff? Already there are quite enough!' Collected were the fares at last, The mule that drew our barge made fast, But not till a good hour was gone. Sleep was not to be thought upon, The cursèd gnats were so provoking, The bull-frogs set up such a croaking. A bargeman, too, a drunken lout, And passenger, sang turn about, In tones remarkable for strength, Their absent sweethearts, till at length The passenger began to doze, When up the stalwart bargeman rose, His fastenings from the stone unwound, And left the mule to graze around; Then down upon his back he lay, And snored in a terrific way. "

Neither is the following allusion to the Jews and their creed withoutits value, especially when followed, as it is, by Horace's avowal, almost in the words of Lucretius (B. VI. 56), of what was then hisown. Later in life he came to a very different conclusion. When thetravellers reach Egnatia, their ridicule is excited by being shown ortold, it is not very clear which, of incense kindled in the templethere miraculously without the application of fire. 

 "This may your circumcisèd Jew Believe, but never I. For true I hold it that the Deities Enjoy themselves in careless ease;[1] Nor think, when Nature, spurning Law, Does something which inspires our awe, 'Tis sent by the offended gods Direct from their august abodes. "

[1] So Tennyson, in his "Lotus-Eaters:"--

 "Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, In the hollow Lotus-land to live and lie reclined On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind. "

 See the whole of the passage. 

Had Horace known anything of natural science, he might not have goneso far to seek for the explanation of the seeming miracle. 

Gibbon speaks contemptuously of many of the incidents recorded in thispoem, asking, "How could a man of taste reflect on them the dayafter?" But the poem has much more than a merely literary interest;thanks to such passages as these, and to the charming tribute byHorace to his friends previously cited. 

Nothing can better illustrate the footing of easy friendship on whichhe soon came to stand with Maecenas than the following poem, whichmust have been written before the year B. C. 32; for in that yearTerentia became the mistress of the great palace on the Esquiline, andthe allusion in the last verse is much too familiar to have beenintended for her. Horace, whose delicacy of stomach was probablynotorious, had apparently been the victim of a practical joke--aspecies of rough fun to which the Romans of the upper classes appearto have been particularly prone. It is difficult otherwise tounderstand how he could have stumbled at Maecenas's table on a dish sooverdosed with garlic as that which provoked this humorous protest. From what we know of the abominations of an ordinary Roman banquet, the vegetable stew in this instance must have reached a climax ofunusual atrocity. 

 "If his old father's throat any impious sinner Has cut with unnatural hand to the bone, Give him garlic, more noxious than hemlock, at dinner. Ye gods! the strong stomachs that reapers must own!

 "With what poison is this that my vitals are heated? By viper's blood--certes, it cannot be less-- Stewed into the potherbs; can I have been cheated? Or Canidia, did she cook the villainous mess?

 "When Medea was struck by the handsome sea-rover, Who in beauty outshone all his Argonaut band, This mixture she took to lard Jason all over, And so tamed the fire-breathing bulls to his hand. 

 "With this her fell presents she dyed and infected, On his innocent leman avenging the slight Of her terrible beauty, forsaken, neglected, And then on her car, dragon-wafted, took flight. 

 "Never star on Apulia, the thirsty and arid, Exhaled a more baleful or pestilent dew, And the gift, which invincible Hercules carried, Burned not to his bones more remorselessly through. 

 "Should you e'er long again for such relish as this is, Devoutly I'll pray, wag Maecenas, I vow, With her hand that your mistress arrest all your kisses, And lie as far off as the couch will allow. "

It is startling to our notions to find so direct a reference as thatin the last verse to the "reigning favourite" of Maecenas; but whatare we to think of the following lines, which point unequivocally toMaecenas's wife, in the following Ode addressed to her husband (Odes, II. 12)?

 "Would you, friend, for Phrygia's hoarded gold, Or all that Achaemenes' self possesses, Or e'en for what Araby's coffers hold, Barter one lock of her clustering tresses, While she stoops her throat to your burning kiss, Or, fondly cruel, the bliss denies you, She would have you snatch, or will, snatching this Herself, with a sweeter thrill surprise you?"

If Maecenas allowed his friends to write of his wife in this strain, it is scarcely to be wondered at if that coquettish and capriciouslady gave, as she did, "that worthy man good grounds for uneasiness. "

CHAPTER IV. 

PUBLICATION OF FIRST BOOK OF SATIRES. --HIS FRIENDS. --RECEIVES THESABINE FARM FROM MAECENAS. 

In B. C. 34, Horace published the First Book of his Satires, and placedin front of it one specially addressed to Maecenas--a course which headopted in each successive section of his poems, apparently to markhis sense of obligation to him as the most honoured of his friends. The name _Satires_ does not truly indicate the nature of thisseries. They are rather didactic poems, couched in a more or lessdramatic form, and carried on in an easy conversational tone, withoutfor the most part any definite purpose, often diverging into suchcollateral topics as suggest themselves by the way, with all the easeand buoyancy of agreeable talk, and getting back or not, as it mayhappen, into the main line of idea with which they set out. Some ofthem are conceived in a vein of fine irony throughout. Others, like"The Journey to Brundusium, " are mere narratives, relieved by humorousillustrations. But we do not find in them the epigrammatic force, thesternness of moral rebuke, or the scathing spirit of sarcasm, whichare commonly associated with the idea of satire. Literary displayappears never to be aimed at. The plainest phrases, the homeliestillustrations, the most everyday topics--if they come in the way--aremade use of for the purpose of insinuating or enforcing some usefultruth. Point and epigram are the last things thought of; and thereforeit is that Pope's translations, admirable as in themselves they are, fail to give an idea of the lightness of touch, the shifting lightsand shades, the carelessness alternating with force, the artlessnatural manner, which distinguish these charming essays. "Theterseness of Horace's language in his Satires, " it has been well said, "is that of a proverb, neat because homely; while the terseness ofPope is that of an epigram, which will only become homely in time, because it is neat. "

In writing these Satires, which he calls merely rhythmical prose, Horace disclaims for himself the title of poet; and at this time itwould appear as if he had not even conceived the idea of "modulatingAeolic song to the Italian lyre, " on which he subsequently rested hishopes of posthumous fame. The very words of his disclaimer, however, show how well he appreciated the poet's gifts (Satires, I. 4):--

 "First from the roll I strike myself of those I poets call, For merely to compose in verse is not the all-in-all; Nor if a man shall write, like me, things nigh to prose akin, Shall he, however well he write, the name of poet win? To genius, to the man-whose soul is touched with fire divine, Whose voice speaks like a trumpet-note, that honoured name assign. 'Tis not enough that you compose your verse In diction irreproachable, pure, scholarly, and terse, Which, dislocate its cadence, by anybody may Be spoken like the language of the father in the play. Divest those things which now I write, and Lucilius wrote of yore, Of certain measured cadences, by setting that before Which was behind, and that before which I had placed behind, Yet by no alchemy will you in the residuum find The members still apparent of the dislocated bard, "--

a result which he contends would not ensue, however much you mightdisarrange the language of a passage of true poetry, such as one hequotes from Ennius, the poetic charm of which, by the way, is not veryapparent. Schooled, however, as he had been, in the pure literature ofGreece, Horace aimed at a conciseness and purity of style which hadbeen hitherto unknown in Roman satire, and studied, notunsuccessfully, to give to his own work, by great and well-disguisedelaboration of finish, the concentrated force and picturesqueprecision which are large elements in all genuine poetry. His ownpractice, as we see from its results, is given in the following lines, and a better description of how didactic or satiric poetry should bewritten could scarcely be desired (Satires, I. 10). 

 "'Tis not enough, a poet's fame to make, That you with bursts of mirth your audience shake; And yet to this, as all experience shows, No small amount of skill and talent goes. Your style must he concise, that what you say May flow on clear and smooth, nor lose its way, Stumbling and halting through a chaos drear Of cumbrous words, that load the weary ear; And you must pass from grave to gay, --now, like The rhetorician, vehemently strike, Now, like the poet, deal a lighter hit With easy playfulness and polished wit, -- Veil the stern vigour of a soul robust, And flash your fancies, while like death you thrust; For men are more impervious, as a rule, To slashing censure than to ridicule. Here lay the merit of those writers, who In the Old Comedy our fathers drew; Here should we struggle in their steps to tread Whom fop Hermogenes has never read, Nor that mere ape of his, who all day long Makes Calvus and Catullus all his song. "

The concluding hit at Hermogenes Tigellius and his double is verycharacteristic of Horace's manner. When he has worked up hisdescription of a vice to be avoided or a virtue to be pursued, hegenerally drives home his lesson by the mention of some well-knownperson's name, thus importing into his literary practice the methodtaken by his father, as we have seen, to impress his ethical teachingsupon himself in his youth. The allusion to Calvus and Catullus, theonly one anywhere made to these poets by Horace, is curious; but itwould be wrong to infer from it, that Horace meant to disparage thesefine poets. Calvus had a great reputation both as an orator and poet. But, except some insignificant fragments, nothing of what he wrote isleft. How Catullus wrote we do, however, know; and although it isconceivable that Horace had no great sympathy with some of his loveverses, which were probably of too sentimental a strain for his taste, we may be sure that he admired the brilliant genius as well as thefine workmanship of many of his other poems. At all events, he had toomuch good sense to launch a sneer at so great a poet recently dead, which would not only have been in the worst taste, but might justlyhave been ascribed to jealousy. When he talks, therefore, of a pair offribbles who can sing nothing but Calvus and Catullus, it is, asMacleane has said in his note on the passage, "as if a man were to sayof a modern English coxcomb, that he could sing Moore's ballads frombeginning to end, but could not understand a line of Shakespeare, "--nodisparagement to Moore, whatever it might be to the vocalist. Hermogenes and his ape (whom we may identify with one Demetrius, whois subsequently coupled with him in the same satire) were musiciansand vocalists, idolised, after the manner of modern Italian singers, by the young misses of Rome. Pampered favourites of fashion, theFarinellis of the hour, their opinion on all matters of taste was sureto be as freely given as it was worthless. They had been, moreover, soindiscreet as to provoke Horace's sarcasm by running down his verses. Leave criticism, he rejoins, to men who have a right to judge. Stickto your proper vocation, and

 "To puling girls, that listen and adore, Your love-lorn chants and woeful wailings pour!"

In the same Satire we have proof how warmly Horace thought and spokeof living poets. Thus:--

 "In grave Iambic measures Pollio sings For our delight the deeds of mighty kings. The stately Epic Varius leads along, And where is voice so resonant, so strong? The Muses of the woods and plains have shed Their every grace and charm on Virgil's head. "

With none of those will he compete. Satire is his element, and therehe proclaims himself to be an humble follower of his greatpredecessor. But while he bows to Lucilius as his master, and owns himsuperior in polish and scholarly grace to the satirists who precededhim, still, he continues--

 "Still, were he living now--had only such Been Fate's decree--he would have blotted much, Cut everything away that could be called Crude or superfluous, or tame, or bald; Oft scratched his head, the labouring poet's trick, And bitten all his nails down to the quick. "

And then he lays down the canon for all high-class composition, whichcan never be too often enforced:--

 "Oh yes, believe me, you must draw your pen Not once or twice, but o'er and o'er again, Through what you've written, if you would entice The man who reads you once to read you twice, Not making popular applause your cue, But looking to find audience fit though few. " (C. )

He had himself followed the rule, and found the reward. With naturalexultation he appeals against the judgment of men of the Hermogenestype to an array of critics of whose good opinion he might well beproud:--

 "Maecenas, Virgil, Varius, --if I please In my poor writings these and such as these, -- If Plotius, Valgius, Fuscus will commend, And good Octavius, I've achieved my end. You, noble Pollio (let your friend disclaim All thoughts of flattery, when he names your name), Messala and his brother, Servius too, And Bibulus, and Furnius kind and true, With others, whom, despite their sense and wit, And friendly hearts, I purposely omit; Such I would have my critics; men to gain Whose smiles were pleasure, to forget them pain. " (C. )

It is not strange that Horace, even in these early days, numbered somany distinguished men among his friends, for, the question of geniusapart, there must have been something particularly engaging in hiskindly and affectionate nature. He was a good hater, as all warm-hearted men are; and when his blood was up, he could, like Diggory, "remember his swashing blow. " He would fain, as he says himself(Satires, II. 1), be at peace with all men:--

 "But he who shall my temper try-- 'Twere best to touch me not, say I-- Shall rue it, and through all the town My verse shall damn him with renown. "

But with his friends he was forbearing, devoted, lenient to theirfoibles, not boring them with his own, liberal in construing theirmotives, and as trustful in their loyalty to himself as he was assuredof his own to them; clearly a man to be loved--a man pleasant to meetand pleasant to remember, constant, and to be relied on in sunshine orin gloom. Friendship with him was not a thing to be given by halves. He could see a friend's faults-no man quicker-but it did not lie inhis mouth to babble about them. He was not one of those who "whisperfaults and hesitate dislikes. " Love me, love my friend, was his rule. Neither would he sit quietly by, while his friends were beingdisparaged. And if he has occasion himself to rally their foibles inhis poems, he does so openly, and does it with such an impliedsympathy and avowal of kindred weakness in himself, that offence wasimpossible. Above all, he possessed in perfection what Mr Disraelihappily calls "the rare gift of raillery, which flatters the self-loveof those whom it seems not to spare. " These characteristics areadmirably indicated by Persius (I. 116) in speaking of his Satires--

 "Arch Horace, while he strove to mend, Probed all the foibles of his smiling friend; Played lightly round and round each peccant part, And won, unfelt, an entrance to his heart. " (Gifford. )

And we may be sure the same qualities were even more conspicuous inhis personal intercourse with his friends. Satirist though he was, heis continually inculcating the duty of charitable judgments towardsall men. 

 "What's done we partly may compute, But know not what's resisted, "

is a thought often suggested by his works. The best need large grainsof allowance, and to whom should these be given if not to friends?Here is his creed on this subject (Satires, I. 3):--

 "True love, we know, is blind; defects, that blight The loved one's charms, escape the lover's sight, Nay, pass for beauties; as Balbinus shows A passion for the wen on Agna's nose. Oh, with our friendships that we did the same, And screened our blindness under virtue's name! For we are bound to treat a friend's defect With touch most tender, and a fond respect; Even as a father treats a child's, who hints, The urchin's eyes are roguish, if he squints: Or if he be as stunted, short, and thick, As Sisyphus the dwarf, will call him 'chick!' If crooked all ways, in back, in legs, and thighs, With softening phrases will the flaw disguise. So, if one friend too close a fist betrays, Let us ascribe it to his frugal ways; Or is another--such we often find-- To flippant jest and braggart talk inclined, 'Tis only from a kindly wish to try To make the time 'mongst friends go lightly by; Another's tongue is rough and over-free, Let's call it bluntness and sincerity; Another's choleric; him we must screen, As cursed with feelings for his peace too keen. This is the course, methinks, that makes a friend, And, having made, secures him to the end. "

What wonder, such being his practice--for Horace in this as in otherthings acted up to his professions--that he was so dear, as we see hewas, to so many of the best men of his time? The very contrast whichhis life presented to that of most of his associates must have helpedto attract them to him. Most of them were absorbed in either politicalor military pursuits. Wealth, power, dignity, the splendid prizes ofambition, were the dream of their lives. And even those whose tastesinclined mainly towards literature and art were not exempt from theprevailing passion for riches and display. Rich, they were eager to bemore rich; well placed in society, they were covetous of higher socialdistinction. Now at Rome, gay, luxurious, dissipated; anon in Spain, Parthia, Syria, Africa, or wherever duty, interest, or pleasure calledthem, encountering perils by land and sea with reckless indifferenceto fatigue and danger, always with a hunger at their hearts forsomething, which, when found, did not appease it; they must have felta peculiar interest in a man who, without apparent effort, seemed toget so much more out of life than they were able to do, with all theirstruggles, and all their much larger apparent means of enjoyment. Theymust have seen that wealth and honour were both within his grasp, andthey must have known, too, that it was from no lack of appreciation ofeither that he deliberately declined to seek them. Wealth would havepurchased for him many a refined pleasure which he could heartilyappreciate, and honours might have saved him from some of the socialslights which must have tested his philosophy. But he told them, inevery variety of phrase and illustration--in ode, in satire, andepistle--that without self-control and temperance in all things, therewould be no joy without remorse, no pleasure without fatigue--that itis from within that happiness must come, if it come at all, and thatunless the mind has schooled itself to peace by the renunciation ofcovetous desires, "We may be wise, or rich, or great, But never can be blest. "

And as he spoke, so they must have seen he lived. Wealth and honourswould manifestly have been bought too dearly at the sacrifice of thetranquillity and independence which he early set before him as theobjects of his life. 

 "The content, surpassing wealth, The sage in meditation found;"

the content which springs from living in consonance with the dictatesof nature, from healthful pursuits, from a conscience void of offence;the content which is incompatible with the gnawing disquietudes ofavarice, of ambition, of social envy, --with that in his heart, he knewhe could be true to his genius, and make life worth living for. A manof this character must always be rare; least of all was he likely tobe common in Horace's day, when the men in whose circle he was movingwere engaged in the great task of crushing the civil strife which hadshaken the stability of the Roman power, and of consolidating anempire greater and more powerful than her greatest statesmen hadpreviously dreamed of. But all the more delightful to these men mustit have been to come into intimate contact with a man who, whileperfectly appreciating their special gifts and aims, could bring themback from the stir and excitement of their habitual life to think ofother things than social or political successes, --to look into theirown hearts, and to live for a time for something better and moreenduring than the triumphs of vanity or ambition. 

Horace from the first seems to have wisely determined to keep himselffree from those shackles which most men are so eager to forge forthemselves, by setting their heart on wealth and social distinction. With perfect sincerity he had told Maecenas, as we have seen, that hecoveted neither, and he gives his reasons thus (Satires, I. 6):--

 "For then a larger income must be made, Men's favour courted, and their whims obeyed; Nor could I then indulge a lonely mood, Away from town, in country solitude, For the false retinue of pseudo-friends, That all my movements servilely attends. More slaves must then be fed, more horses too, And chariots bought. Now have I nought to do, If I would even to Tarentum ride, But mount my bobtailed mule, my wallets tied Across his flanks, which, napping as we go, With my ungainly ankles to and fro, Work his unhappy sides a world of weary woe. "

From this wise resolution he never swerved, and so through life hemaintained an attitude of independence in thought and action whichwould otherwise have been impossible. He does not say it in so manywords, but the sentiment meets us all through his pages, which Burns, whose mode of thinking so often reminds us of Horace, puts into theline, "My freedom's a lairdship nae monarch may touch. "

And we shall hereafter have occasion to see that, when put to theproof, he acted upon this creed. "Well might the overworked statesmanhave envied the poet the ease and freedom of his life, and longed tobe able to spend a day as Horace, in the same Satire, tells us hisdays were passed!--

 "I walk alone, by mine own fancy led, Inquire the price of potherbs and of bread, The circus cross, to see its tricks and fun, The forum, too, at times, near set of sun; With other fools there do I stand and gape Bound fortune-tellers' stalls, thence home escape To a plain meal of pancakes, pulse, and pease; Three young boy-slaves attend on me with these. Upon a slab of snow-white marble stand A goblet and two beakers; near at hand, A common ewer, patera, and bowl; Campania's potteries produced the whole. To sleep then I.... I keep my couch till ten, then walk awhile, Or having read or writ what may beguile A quiet after-hour, anoint my limbs With oil, not such as filthy Natta skims From lamps defrauded of their unctuous fare. And when the sunbeams, grown too hot to bear, Warn me to quit the field, and hand-ball play, The bath takes all my weariness away. Then, having lightly dined, just to appease The sense of emptiness, I take mine ease, Enjoying all home's simple luxury. This is the life of bard unclogged, like me, By stern ambition's miserable weight. So placed, I own with gratitude, my state Is sweeter, ay, than though a quaestor's power From sire and grandsire's sires had been my dower. "

It would not have been easy to bribe a man of these simple habits andtastes, as some critics have contended that Horace was bribed, tobecome the laureate of a party to which he had once been opposed, evenhad Maecenas wished to do so. His very indifference to those favourswhich were within the disposal of a great minister of state, placedhim on a vantage-ground in his relations with Maecenas which he couldin no other way have secured. Nor, we may well believe, would thatdistinguished man have wished it otherwise. Surrounded as he was byservility and selfish baseness, he must have felt himself irresistiblydrawn towards a nature so respectful, yet perfectly manly andindependent, as that of the poet. Nor can we doubt that intimacy hadgrown into friendship, warm and sincere, before he gratified his ownfeelings, while he made Horace happy for life, by presenting him witha small estate in the Sabine country--a gift which, we may be sure, heknew well would be of all gifts the most welcome. It is demonstrablethat it was not given earlier than B. C. 33, or after upwards of fouryears of intimate acquaintance. That Horace had longed for such apossession, he tells us himself (Satires, II. 6). He had probablyexpressed his longing in the hearing of his friend, and to such afriend the opportunity of turning the poet's dream into a reality musthave been especially delightful. 

The gift was a slight one for Maecenas to bestow; but, with Horace'sfondness for the country, it had a value for him beyond all price. Itgave him a competency--_satis superque_--enough and more than hewanted for his needs. It gave him leisure, health, amusement; and, more precious than all, it secured him undisturbed freedom of thought, and opportunities for that calm intercourse with nature which he"needed for his spirit's health. " Never was gift better bestowed, ormore worthily requited. To it we are indebted for much of that poetrywhich has linked the name of Maecenas with that of the poet inassociations the most engaging, and has afforded, and will afford, ever-new delight to successive generations. The Sabine farm wassituated in the Valley of Ustica, thirty miles from Rome, and twelvemiles from Tivoli. It possessed the attraction, no small one toHorace, of being very secluded--Varia (Vico Varo), the nearest town, being four miles off--yet, at the same time, within an easy distanceof Rome. When his spirits wanted the stimulus of society or the bustleof the capital, which they often did, his ambling mule could speedilyconvey him thither; and when jaded, on the other hand, by the noiseand racket and dissipations of Rome, he could, in the same homely way, bury himself within a few hours among the hills, and there, under theshadow of his favourite Lucretilis, or by the banks of the clear-flowing and ice-cold Digentia, either stretch himself to dream uponthe grass, lulled by the murmurs of the stream, or do a little fanningin the way of clearing his fields of stones, or turning over a furrowhere and there with the hoe. There was a rough wildness in the sceneryand a sharpness in the air, both of which Horace liked, although, asyears advanced and his health grew more delicate, he had to leave itin the colder months for Tivoli or Baiae. He built a villa upon it, oradded to one already there, the traces of which still exist. The farmgave employment to five families of free _coloni_, who were underthe superintendence of a bailiff; and the poet's domesticestablishment was composed of eight slaves. The site of the farm is atthe present day a favourite resort of travellers, of Englishmenespecially, who visit it in such numbers, and trace its features withsuch enthusiasm, that the resident peasantry, "who cannot conceive ofany other source of interest in one so long dead and unsainted thanthat of co-patriotism or consanguinity, " believe Horace to have beenan Englishman [Footnote: Letter by Mr Dennis: Milman's 'Horace. 'London, 1849. P. 109. ]. What aspect it presented in Horace's time wegather from one of his Epistles (I. 16):--

 "About my farm, dear Quinctius: You would know What sort of produce for its lord 'twill grow; Plough-land is it, or meadow-land, or soil For apples, vine-clad elms, or olive-oil? So (but you'll think me garrulous) I'll write A full description of its form and site. In long continuous lines the mountains run, Cleft by a valley, which twice feels the sun-- Once on the right, when first he lifts his beams; Once on the left, when he descends in steams. You'd praise the climate; well, and what d'ye say To sloes and cornels hanging from the spray? What to the oak and ilex, that afford Fruit to the cattle, shelter to their lord? What, but that rich Tarentum must have been Transplanted nearer Rome, with all its green? Then there's a fountain, of sufficient size To name the river that takes thence its rise-- Not Thracian Hebrus colder or more pure, Of power the head's and stomach's ills to cure. This sweet retirement--nay, 'tis more than sweet-- Insures my health even in September's heat. " (C. )

Here is what a last year's tourist found it:--('Pall Mall Gazette, 'August 16, 1869. )

"Following a path along the brink of the torrent Digentia, we passed atowering rock, on which once stood Vacuna's shrine, and entered apastoral region of well-watered meadow-lands, enamelled with flowersand studded with chestnut and fruit trees. Beneath their shelteringshade peasants were whiling away the noontide hours. Here sat Daphnispiping sweet witching melodies on a reed to his rustic Phidyle, whilstLydia and she wove wreaths of wild-flowers, and Lyce sped down to theedge of the stream and brought us cooling drink in a bulging concaborne on her head. Its waters were as deliciously refreshing as theycould have been when the poet himself gratefully recorded how oftenthey revived his strength; and one longed to think, and hence halfbelieved, that our homely Hebe, like her fellows, was sprung from thecoloni who tilled his fields and dwelt in the five homesteads of whichhe sings. ... Near the little village of Licenza, standing like itsloftier neighbour, Civitella, on a steep hill at the foot ofLucretilis, we turned off the path, crossed a thickly-wooded knoll, and came to an orchard, in which two young labourers were at work. Weasked where the remains of Horace's farm were. '_A pie tui!_'answered the nearest of them, in a dialect more like Latin thanItalian. So saying, he began with a shovel to uncover a massive floorin very fair preservation; a little farther on was another, crumblingto pieces. Chaupy has luckily saved one all doubt as to the site ofthe farm, establishing to our minds convincingly that it couldscarcely have stood on ground other than that on which at this momentwe were. As the shovel was clearing the floors, we thought howapplicable to Horace himself were the lines he addressed to FuscusAristius, 'Naturam expelles, ' &c. --

 'Drive Nature forth by force, she'll turn and rout The false refinements that would keep her out;' (C. )

For here was just enough of his home left to show how nature, creepingon step by step, had overwhelmed his handiwork and reasserted hersway. Again, pure and Augustan in design as was the pavement beforeus, how little could it vie with the hues and odours of the grassesthat bloomed around it!--'Deterius Libycis' &c. --

 'Is springing grass less sweet to nose and eyes Than Libyan marble's tesselated dyes?' (C. )

"Indeed, so striking were these coincidences that we were as nearly aspossible going off on the wrong tack, and singing 'Io Paean' to DameNature herself at the expense of the bard; but we were soon broughtback to our allegiance by a sense of the way in which all we sawtallied with the description of him who sang of nature so surpassinglywell, who challenges posterity in charmed accents, and could shape thesternest and most concise of tongues into those melodious cadencesthat invest his undying verse with all the magic of music and all thefreshness of youth. For this was clearly the 'angulus iste, ' the nookwhich 'restored him to himself'--this the lovely spot which hissteward longed to exchange for the slums of Rome. Below lay thegreensward by the river, where it was sweet to recline in slumber. Here grew the vines, still trained, like his own, on the trunks andbranches of trees. Yonder the brook which the rain would swell till itoverflowed its margin, and his lazy steward and slaves were fain tobank it up; and above, among a wild jumble of hills, lay the woodswhere, on the Calends of March, Faunus interposed to save him from thefalling tree, and where another miracle preserved him from the attackof the wolf as he strolled along unarmed, singing of the soft voiceand sweet smiles of his Lalage! The brook is now nearly dammed up; awall of close-fitting rough-hewn stones gathers its waters into astill, dark pool; its overflow gushes out in a tiny rill that rusheddown beside our path, mingling its murmur with the hum of myriads ofinsects that swarmed in the air. "

On this farm lovers of Horace have been fain to place the fountain ofBandusia, which the poet loved so well, and to which he prophesied, and truly, as the issue has proved, immortality from his song (Odes, III. 13). Charming as the poem is, there could be no stronger proof ofthe poet's hold upon the hearts of men of all ages than the enthusiasmwith which the very site of the spring has been contested. 

 "Bandusia's fount, in clearness crystalline, O worthy of the wine, the flowers we vow! To-morrow shall be thine A kid, whose crescent brow

 "Is sprouting, all for love and victory, In vain; his warm red blood, so early stirred, Thy gelid stream shall dye, Child of the wanton herd. 

 "Thee the fierce Sirian star, to madness fired, Forbears to touch; sweet cool thy waters yield To ox with ploughing tired, And flocks that range afield. 

 "Thou too one day shall win proud eminence 'Mid honoured founts, while I the ilex sing Crowning the cavern, whence Thy babbling wavelets spring. " (C. )

Several commentators maintain, on what appears to be very inconclusivegrounds, that the fountain was at Palazzo, six miles from Venusia. Butthe poem is obviously inspired by a fountain whose babble had oftensoothed the ear of Horace, long after he had ceased to visit Venusia. On his farm, therefore, let us believe it to exist, whichever of thesprings that are still there we may choose to identify with hisdescription. For there are several, and the local guides are by nomeans dogmatic as to the "_vero fonte_. " That known as the "Fontedella Corte" seems to make out the strongest case for itself. It iswithin a few hundred yards of the villa, most abundant, and in thisrespect "fit" to name the river that there takes its rise, which theothers--at present, at least--certainly are not. 

Horace is never weary of singing the praises of his mountain home--"_Satis beatus unicis Sabinis_, "

 "With what I have completely blest, My happy little Sabine nest"-- Odes, II. 18. 

are the words in which he contrasts his own entire happiness with therestless misery of a millionaire in the midst of his splendour. Again, in one of his Odes to Maecenas (III. 16) he takes up and expands thesame theme. 

 "In my crystal stream, my woodland, though its acres are but few, And the trust that I shall gather home my crops in season due, Lies a joy, which he may never grasp, who rules in gorgeous state Fertile Africa's dominions. Happier, happier far my fate! Though for me no bees Calabrian store their honey, nor doth wine Sickening in the Laestrygonian amphora for me refine; Though for me no flocks unnumbered, browsing Gallia's pastures fair, Pant beneath their swelling fleeces, I at least am free from care; Haggard want with direful clamour ravins never at my door, Nor wouldst thou, if more I wanted, oh my friend, deny me more. Appetites subdued will make me richer with my scanty gains, Than the realms of Alyattes wedded to Mygdonia's plains. Much will evermore be wanting unto those who much demand; Blest, whom Jove with what sufficeth dowers, but dowers with sparinghand. "

It is the nook of earth which, beyond all others, has a charm forhim, --the one spot where he is all his own. Here, as Wordsworthbeautifully says, he

 "Exults in freedom, can with rapture vouch For the dear blessings of a lowly couch, A natural meal, days, months from Nature's hand, Time, place, and business all at his command, "

It is in this delightful retreat that, in one of his most gracefulOdes, he thus invites the fair Tyndaris to pay him a visit (I. 17):--

 "My own sweet Lucretilis ofttime can lureFrom his native Lycaeus kind Faunus the fleet, To watch o'er my flocks, and to keep them secure From summer's fierce winds, and its rains, and its heat. 

 "There the mates of a lord of too pungent a fragrance Securely through brake and o'er precipice climb, And crop, as they wander in happiest vagrance, The arbutus green, and the sweet-scented thyme. 

 "Nor murderous wolf nor green snake may assail My innocent kidlings, dear Tyndaris, when His pipings resound through Ustica's low vale, Till each mossed rock in music makes answer again. 

 "The muse is still dear to the gods, and they shield Me, their dutiful bard; with a bounty divine They have blessed me with all that the country can yield; Then come, and whatever I have shall be thine!

 "Here screened from the dog-star, in valley retired, Shalt thou sing that old song thou canst warble so well, Which tells how one passion Penelope fired, And charmed fickle Circe herself by its spell. 

 "Here cups shalt thou sip, 'neath the broad-spreading shade Of the innocent vintage of Lesbos at ease; No fumes of hot ire shall our banquet invade, Or mar that sweet festival under the trees. 

 "And fear not, lest Cyrus, that jealous young bear, On thy poor little self his rude fingers should set-- Should pluck from thy bright locks the chaplet, and tear Thy dress, that ne'er harmed him nor any one yet. "

Had Milton this Ode in his thought, when he invited his friend Lawesto a repast, "Light and choice, Of Attic taste with wine, whence we may rise, To hear the lute well touched, and artful voice Warble immortal notes, and Tuscan air"?

The reference in the last verse to the violence of the lady's lover--aviolence of which ladies of her class were constantly the victims--rather suggests that this Ode, if addressed to a real personage atall, was meant less as an invitation to the Sabine farm than as a balmto the lady's wounded spirit. 

In none of his poems is the poet's deep delight in the country life ofhis Sabine home more apparent than in the following (Satires, II. 6), which, both for its biographical interest and as a specimen of hisbest manner in his Satires, we give entire:--

 "My prayers with this I used to charge, -- A piece of land not very large, Wherein there should a garden be, A clear spring flowing ceaselessly, And where, to crown the whole, there should A patch be found of growing wood. All this, and more, the gods have sent, And I am heartily content. Oh son of Maia, that I may These bounties keep is all I pray. If ne'er by craft or base design I've swelled what little store is mine, Nor mean, it ever shall be wrecked By profligacy or neglect; If never from my lips a word Shall drop of wishes so absurd As, --'Had I but that little nook Next to my land, that spoils its look! Or--'Would some lucky chance unfold A crock to me of hidden gold, As to the man whom Hercules Enriched and settled at his ease, Who, --with, the treasure he had found, Bought for himself the very ground Which he before for hire had tilled!' If I with gratitude am filled For what I have--by this I dare Adjure you to fulfil my prayer, That you with fatness will endow My little herd of cattle now, And all things else their lord may own, Except his sorry wits alone, And be, as heretofore, my chief Protector, guardian, and relief! So, when from town and all its ills I to my perch among the hills Retreat, what better theme to choose Than satire for my homely Muse? No fell ambition wastes me there, No, nor the south wind's leaden air, Nor Autumn's pestilential breath, With victims feeding hungry death. Sire of the morn, or if more dear The name of Janus to thine ear, Through whom whate'er by man is done, From life's first dawning, is begun (So willed the gods for man's estate), Do thou my verse initiate! At Rome you hurry me away To bail my friend; 'Quick, no delay, Or some one--could worse luck befall you?-- Will in the kindly task forestall you. ' So go I must, although the wind Is north and killingly unkind, Or snow, in thickly-falling flakes, The wintry day more wintry makes. And when, articulate and clear, I've spoken what may cost me dear, Elbowing the crowd that round me close, I'm sure to crush somebody's toes. 'I say, where are you pushing to? What would you have, you madman, you?' So flies he at poor me, 'tis odds, And curses me by all his gods. 'You think that you, now, I daresay, May push whatever stops your way, When you are to Maecenas bound!' Sweet, sweet, as honey is the sound, I won't deny, of that last speech, But then no sooner do I reach The dusky Esquiline, than straight Buzz, buzz around me runs the prate Of people pestering me with cares, All about other men's affairs. 'To-morrow, Roscius bade me state, He trusts you'll be in court by eight!' 'The scriveners, worthy Quintus, pray, You'll not forget they meet to-day, Upon a point both grave and new, One touching the whole body, too. ' 'Do get Maecenas, do, to sign This application here of mine!' 'Well, well, I'll try. ' 'You can with ease Arrange it, if you only please. ' Close on eight years it now must be, Since first Maecenas numbered me Among his friends, as one to take Out driving with him, and to make The confidant of trifles, say, Like this, 'What is the time of day?' 'The Thracian gladiator, can One match him with the Syrian?' 'These chilly mornings will do harm, If one don't mind to wrap up warm;' Such nothings as without a fear One drops into the chinkiest ear. Yet all this tune hath envy's glance On me looked more and more askance. From mouth to mouth such comments run: 'Our friend indeed is Fortune's son. Why, there he was, the other day, Beside Maecenas at the play; And at the Campus, just before, They had a bout at battledore. ' Some chilling news through lane and street Spreads from the Forum. All I meet Accost me thus--'Dear friend, you're so Close to the gods, that you must know: About the Dacians, have you heard Any fresh tidings? Not a word!' 'You're always jesting!' 'Now may all The gods confound me, great and small, If I have heard one word!' 'Well, well, But you at any rate can tell, If Caesar means the lands, which he Has promised to his troops, shall be Selected from Italian ground, Or in Trinacria be found?' And when I swear, as well I can, That I know nothing, for a man Of silence rare and most discreet They cry me up to all the street. Thus do my wasted days slip by, Not without many a wish and sigh, When, when shall I the country see, Its woodlands green, --oh, when be free, With books of great old men, and sleep, And hours of dreamy ease, to creep Into oblivion sweet of life, Its agitations and its strife? [1] When on my table shall be seen Pythagoras's kinsman bean, And bacon, not too fat, embellish My dish of greens, and give it relish! Oh happy nights, oh feasts divine, When, with the friends I love, I dine At mine own hearth-fire, and the meat We leave gives my bluff hinds a treat! No stupid laws our feasts control, But each guest drains or leaves the bowl, Precisely as he feels inclined. If he be strong, and have a mind For bumpers, good! if not, he's free To sip his liquor leisurely. And then the talk our banquet rouses! But not about our neighbours' houses, Or if 'tis generally thought That Lepos dances well or not? But what concerns us nearer, and Is harmful not to understand, By what we're led to choose our friends, -- Regard for them, or our own ends? In what does good consist, and what Is the supremest form of that? And then friend Cervius will strike in With some old grandam's tale, akin To what we are discussing. Thus, If some one have cried up to us Arellius' wealth, forgetting how Much care it costs him, 'Look you now, Once on a time, ' he will begin, 'A country mouse received within His rugged cave a city brother, As one old comrade would another. "A frugal mouse upon the whole, But loved his friend, and had a soul, " And could be free and open-handed, When hospitality demanded. In brief, he did not spare his hoard Of corn and pease, long coyly stored; Raisins he brought, and scraps, to boot, Half-gnawed, of bacon, which he put With his own mouth before his guest, In hopes, by offering his best In such variety, he might Persuade him to an appetite. But still the cit, with languid eye, Just picked a bit, then put it by; Which with dismay the rustic saw, As, stretched upon some stubbly straw, He munched at bran and common grits, Not venturing on the dainty bits. At length the town mouse; "What, " says he, "My good friend, can the pleasure be, Of grubbing here, on the backbone Of a great crag with trees o'ergrown? Who'd not to these wild woods prefer The city, with its crowds and stir? Then come with me to town; you'll ne'er Regret the hour that took you there. All earthly things draw mortal breath; Nor great nor little can from death Escape, and therefore, friend, be gay, Enjoy life's good things while you may, Remembering how brief the space Allowed to you in any case. " His words strike home; and, light of heart, Behold with him our rustic start, Timing their journey so, they might Reach town beneath the cloud of night, Which was at its high noon, when they To a rich mansion found their way, Where shining ivory couches vied With coverlets in purple dyed, And where in baskets were amassed The wrecks of a superb repast, Which some few hours before had closed. There, having first his friend disposed Upon a purple tissue, straight The city mouse begins to wait With scraps upon his country brother, Each scrap more dainty than another, And all a servant's duty proffers, First tasting everything he offers. The guest, reclining there in state, Rejoices in his altered fate, O'er each fresh tidbit smacks his lips, And breaks into the merriest quips, When suddenly a banging door Shakes host and guest into the floor. Prom room to room they rush aghast, And almost drop down dead at last, When loud through all the house resounds The deep bay of Molossian hounds. "Ho!" cries the country mouse, "this kind Of life is not for me, I find. Give me my woods and cavern! There At least I'm safe! And though both spare And poor my food may be, rebel I never will; so, fare ye well!"'"

[1] Many have imitated this passage--none better than Cowley. 

 "Oh fountains! when in you shall I Myself, eased of unpeaceful thoughts, espy? Oh fields! oh woods! when, when shall I be made The happy tenant of your shade? Here's the spring-head of pleasure's flood, Where all the riches be, that she Has coined and stamped for good. "

 How like is this to Tennyson's--

 "You'll have no scandal while you dine, But honest talk and wholesome wine, And only hear the magpie gossip Garrulous, under a roof of pine. "

It is characteristic of Horace that in the very next satire he makeshis own servant Davus tell him that his rhapsodies about the countryand its charms are mere humbug, and that, for all his ridicule of theshortcomings of his neighbours, he is just as inconstant as they arein his likings and dislikings. The poet in this way lets us see intohis own little vanities, and secures the right by doing so to rallyhis friends for theirs. To his valet, at all events, by his ownshowing, he is no hero. 

 "You're praising up incessantly The habits, manners, likings, ways, Of people hi the good old days; Yet should some god this moment give To you the power, like them to live, You're just the man to say, ' I won't!' Because in them you either don't Believe, or else the courage lack, The truth through thick and thin to back, And, rather than its heights aspire, Will go on sticking in the mire. At Rome you for the country sigh; When in the country to the sky You, flighty as the thistle's down, Are always crying up the town. If no one asks you out to dine, Oh, then the _pot-au-feu's_ divine! 'You go out on compulsion only-- 'Tis so delightful to be lonely; And drinking bumpers is a bore You shrink from daily more and more. ' But only let Maecenas send Command for you to meet a friend; Although the message comes so late, The lamps are being lighted, straight, 'Where's my pommade? Look sharp!' you shout, 'Heavens! is there nobody about? Are you all deaf?' and, storming high At all the household, off you fly. When Milvius, and that set, anon Arrive to dine, and find you gone, With vigorous curses they retreat, Which I had rather not repeat. "

Who could take amiss the rebuke of the kindly satirist, who was soready to show up his own weaknesses? In this respect our own greatsatirist Thackeray is very like him. Nor is this strange. They hadmany points in common--the same keen eye for human folly, the sametolerance for the human weaknesses of which they were so conscious inthemselves, the same genuine kindness of heart. Thackeray's terse andvivid style, too, is probably in some measure due to this, that tohim, as to Malherbe, Horace was a kind of breviary. 

CHAPTER V. 

LIFE IN ROME. --HORACE'S BORE. --EXTRAVAGANCE OF THE ROMAN DINNERS. 

It is one of the many charms of Horace's didactic writings, that hetakes us into the very heart of the life of Rome. We lounge with itsloungers along the Via Sacra; we stroll into the Campus Martius, whereyoung Hebrus with his noble horsemanship is witching the blushingNeobule, already too much enamoured of the handsome Liparian; and themen of the old school are getting up an appetite by games of tennis, bowls, or quoits; while the young Grecianised fops--lisping feeblejokes--saunter by with a listless contempt for such vulgar gymnastics. We are in the Via Appia. Bariné sweeps along in her chariot in superbtoilette, shooting glances from her sleepy cruel eyes. The youngfellows are all agaze. What is this? Young Pompilius, not three monthsmarried, bows to her, with a visible spasm at the heart, as shehurries by, full in view of his young wife, who hides hermortification within the curtains of her litter, and hastens home tosolitude and tears. Here comes Barrus--as ugly a dog as any in Rome--dressed to death; and smiling Malvolio--smiles of self-complacency. The girls titter and exchange glances as he passes; Barrus swaggerson, feeling himself an inch taller in the conviction that he isslaughtering the hearts of the dear creatures by the score. A mule, with a dead boar thrown across it, now winds its way among thechariots and litters. A little ahead of it stalks Gargilius, attendedby a strong force of retainers armed with spears and nets, enough tothin the game of the Hercynian forest. Little does the mighty hunterdream, that all his friends, who congratulate him on his success, areasking themselves and each other, where he bought the boar, and forhow much? Have we never encountered a piscatory Gargilius near theSpey or the Tweed? We wander back into the city and its narrowstreets. In one we are jammed into a doorway by a train of builders'waggons laden with huge blocks of stone, or massive logs of timber. Escaping these, we run against a line of undertakers' men, "performing" a voluminous and expensive funeral, to the discomfort ofeverybody and the impoverishment of the dead man's kindred. In thenext street we run the risk of being crushed by some huge piece ofmasonry in the act of being swung by a crane into its place; and whilecalculating the chances of its fall with upturned eye, we findourselves landed in the gutter by an unclean pig, which has dartedbetween our legs at some attractive garbage beyond. This peril over, we encounter at the next turning a mad dog, who makes a passing snapat our toga as he darts into a neighbouring blind alley, whither we donot care to follow his vagaries among a covey of young Roman streetArabs. Before we reach home a mumping beggar drops before us as weturn the corner, in a well-simulated fit of epilepsy or of helplesslameness. _'Quoere peregrinum'_--"Try that game on countrycousins, "--we mutter in our beard, and retreat to our lodgings on thethird floor, encountering probably on the stair some half-tipsyartisan or slave, who is descending from the attics for another cup offiery wine at the nearest wine-shop. We go to the theatre. The play is"Ilione, " by Pacuvius; the scene a highly sensational one, where theghost of Deiphobus, her son, appearing to Ilione, beseeches her togive his body burial. "Oh mother, mother, " he cries, in tones mostraucously tragic, "hear me call!" But the Kynaston of the day whoplays Ilione has been soothing his maternal sorrow with too potentFalernian. He slumbers on. The populace, like the gods of our gallery, surmise the truth, and, "Oh! mother, mother, hear me call!" isbellowed from a thousand lungs. We are enjoying a comedy, when ourfriends the people, "the many-headed monster of the pit, " begin tothink it slow, and stop the performance with shouts for a show ofbears or boxers. Or, hoping to hear a good play, we find theentertainment offered consists of pure spectacle, "inexplicabledumbshow and noise"--

 "Whole fleets of ships in long procession pass, And captive ivory follows captive brass. " (C. )

A milk-white elephant or a camelopard is considered more than asubstitute for character, incident, or wit. And if an actor presentshimself in a dress of unusual splendour, the house is in ecstasies, and a roar of applause, loud as a tempest in the Garganian forest, oras the surges on the Tuscan strand, makes the velarium vibrate abovetheir heads. Human nature is perpetually repeating itself. So whenPope is paraphrasing Horace, he has no occasion to alter the facts, which were the same in his pseudo, as in the real, Augustan age, butonly to modernise the names:--

 "Loud as the waves on Orcas' stormy steep Howl to the roarings of the Northern deep, Such is the shout, the long-applauding note, At Quin's high plume, or Oldfield's petticoat. Booth enters--hark! the universal peal. 'But has he spoken?' Not a syllable. 'What shook the stage, and made the people stare?' 'Cato's long wig, flowered gown, and lackered chair. '"

We dine out. Maecenas is of the party, and comes in leaning heavily onthe two umbrae (guests of his own inviting) whom he has brought withhim, --habitués of what Augustus called his "parasitical table, " whomake talk and find buffoonery for him. He is out of spirits to-day, and more reserved than usual, for a messenger has just come in withbad news from Spain, or he has heard of a conspiracy against Augustus, which must be crushed before it grows more dangerous. Varius is there, and being a writer of tragedies, keeps up, as your tragic author issure to do, a ceaseless fire of puns and pleasantry. At these youngSybaris smiles faintly, for his thoughts are away with his ladylove, the too fascinating Lydia. Horace--who, from the other side of thetable, with an amused smile in his eyes, watches him, as he "sighslike furnace, " while Neaera, to the accompaniment of her lyre, singsone of Sappho's most passionate odes--whispers something in the ear ofthe brilliant vocalist, which visibly provokes a witty repartee, witha special sting in it for Horace himself, at which the little manwinces--for have there not been certain love-passages of old betweenNeaera and himself? The wine circulates freely. Maecenas warms, anddrops, with the deliberation of a rich sonorous voice, now some sharpsarcasm, now some aphorism heavy with meaning, which sticks to thememory, like a saying of Talleyrand's. His _umbrae_, who have putbut little of allaying Tiber in their cups, grow boisterous andabusive, and having insulted nearly everybody at the table by coarsepersonal banter, the party breaks up, and we are glad to get out withflushed cheeks and dizzy head into the cool air of an early summernight--all the more, that for the last half-hour young Piso at ourelbow has been importuning us with whispered specimens of his veryrickety elegiacs, and trying to settle an early appointment for us tohear him read the first six books of the great Epic with which hemeans to electrify the literary circles. We reach the Fabricianbridge, meditating as we go the repartees with which we might haveturned the tables on those scurrilous followers of the great man, butdid not. Suddenly we run up against a gentleman, who, raising hiscloak over his head, is on the point of jumping into the Tiber. Weseize him by his mantle, and discover in the intended suicide an oldacquaintance, equally well known to the Jews and the bric-a-bracshops, whose tastes for speculation and articles of _vertu_ havefirst brought him to the money-lenders, next to the dogs, and finallyto the brink of the yellow Tiber. We give him all the sesterces wehave about us, along with a few sustaining aphorisms from ourcommonplace book upon the folly, if not the wickedness, of suicide, and see him safely home. When we next encounter the decayed_virtuoso_, he has grown a beard (very badly kept), and set up asa philosopher of the hyper-virtuous Jaques school. Of course helectures us upon every vice which we have not, and every littlefrailty which we have, with a pointed asperity that upsets our temperfor the day, and causes us long afterwards to bewail the evil hour inwhich we rescued such an ill-conditioned grumbler from the kindlywaters of the river. 

These hints of life and manners, all drawn from the pages of Horace, might be infinitely extended, and a ramble in the streets of Rome inthe present day is consequently fuller of vivid interest to a man whohas these pages at his fingers' ends than it can possibly be to anyother person. Horace is so associated with all the localities, thatone would think it the most natural thing in the world to come uponhim at any turning. His old familiar haunts rise up about us out ofthe dust of centuries. We see a short thick-set man come saunteringalong, "more fat than bard beseems. " As he passes, lost in reverie, many turn round and look at him. Some point him out to theircompanions, and by what they say, we learn that this is Horace, thefavourite of Maecenas, the frequent visitor at the unpretending palaceof Augustus, the self-made man and famous poet. He is still withinsight, when his progress is arrested. He is in the hands of a bore ofthe first magnitude. But what ensued, let us hear from his own lips(Satires, I. 9):--

 THE BORE. 

 It chanced that I, the other day, Was sauntering up the Sacred Way, And musing, as my habit is, Some trivial random fantasies, That for the time absorbed me quite, When there comes running up a wight, Whom only by his name I knew; "Ha! my dear fellow, how d'ye do?" Grasping my hand, he shouted. "Why, As times go, pretty well, " said I; "And you, I trust, can say the same. " But after me as still he came, "Sir, is there anything, " I cried, "You want of me?" "Oh, " he replied, "I'm just the man you ought to know;-- A scholar, author!" "Is it so? For this I'll like you all the more!" Then, writhing to evade the bore, I quicken now my pace, now stop, And in my servant's ear let drop Some words, and all the while I feel Bathed in cold sweat from head to heel. "Oh, for a touch, " I moaned, in pain, "Bolanus, of thy madcap vein, To put this incubus to rout!" As he went chattering on about Whatever he descries or meets, The crowds, the beauty of the streets, The city's growth, its splendour, size, "You're dying to be off, " he cries; For all the while I'd been stock dumb. "I've seen it this half-hour. But come, Let's clearly understand each other; It's no use making all this pother. My mind's made up, to stick by you; So where you go, there I go, too. " "Don't put yourself, " I answered, "pray, So very far out of your way. I'm on the road to see a friend, Whom you don't know, that's near his end, Away beyond the Tiber far, Close by where Caesar's gardens are. " "I've nothing in the world to do, And what's a paltry mile or two? I like it, so I'll follow you!" Down dropped my ears on hearing this, Just like a vicious jackass's, That's loaded heavier than he likes; But off anew my torment strikes. "If well I know myself, you'll end With making of me more a friend Than Viscus, ay, or Varius; for Of verses who can run off more, Or run them off at such a pace? Who dance with such distinguished grace? And as for singing, zounds!" said he, "Hermogenes might envy me!" Here was an opening to break in. "Have you a mother, father, kin, To whom your life is precious?" "None;-- I've closed the eyes of every one. " Oh, happy they, I inly groan. Now I am left, and I alone. Quick, quick, despatch me where I stand; Now is the direful doom at hand, Which erst the Sabine beldam old, Shaking her magic urn, foretold In days when I was yet a boy: "Him shall no poisons fell destroy, Nor hostile sword in shock of war, Nor gout, nor colic, nor catarrh. In fulness of the time his thread Shall by a prate-apace be shred; So let him, when he's twenty-one, If he be wise, all babblers shun. " Now we were close to Vesta's fane, 'Twas hard on ten, and he, my bane, Was bound to answer to his bail, Or lose his cause if he should fail. "Do, if you love me, step aside One moment with me here!" he cried. "Upon my life, indeed, I can't, Of law I'm wholly ignorant; And you know where I'm hurrying to. " "I'm fairly puzzled what to do. Give you up, or my cause?" "Oh, me, Me, by all means!" "I won't!" quoth he; And stalks on, holding by me tight. As with your conqueror to fight Is hard, I follow. "How, "--anon He rambles off, --"how get you on, You and Maecenas? To so few He keeps himself. So clever, too! No man more dexterous to seize And use his opportunities. Just introduce me, and you'll see, We'd pull together famously; And, hang me then, if, with my backing, You don't send all your rivals packing!" "Things in that quarter, sir, proceed In very different style, indeed. No house more free from all that's base; In none cabals more out of place. It hurts me not if others be More rich, or better read than me. Each has his place!" "Amazing tact! Scarce credible!" "But 'tis the fact. " "You quicken my desire to get An introduction to his set. " "With merit such as yours, you need But wish it, and you must succeed. He's to be won, and that is why Of strangers he's so very shy. " "I'll spare no pains, no arts, no shifts! His servants I'll corrupt with gifts. To-day though driven from his gate, What matter? I will lie in wait, To catch some lucky chance; I'll meet Or overtake him in the street; I'll haunt him like his shadow. Nought In life without much toil is bought. " Just at this moment who but my Dear friend Aristius should come by? My rattlebrain right well he knew. We stop. "Whence, friends, and whither to?" He asks and answers. Whilst we ran The usual courtesies, I began To pluck him by the sleeve, to pinch His arms, that feel but will not flinch, By nods and winks most plain to see Imploring him to rescue me. He, wickedly obtuse the while, Meets all my signals with a smile. I, choked with rage, said, "Was there not Some business, I've forgotten what, You mentioned, that you wished with me To talk about, and privately?" "Oh, I remember! Never mind! Some more convenient time I'll find. The Thirtieth Sabbath this! Would you Affront the circumcised Jew?" "Religious scruples I have none. " "Ah, but I have. I am but one Of the _canaille_--a feeble brother. Your pardon. Some fine day or other I'll tell you what it was. " Oh, day Of woeful doom to me! Away The rascal bolted like an arrow, And left me underneath the harrow; When, by the rarest luck, we ran At the next turn against the man, Who had the lawsuit with my bore. "Ha, knave!" he cried with loud uproar, "Where are you off to? Will you here Stand witness?" I present my ear. To court he hustles him along; High words are bandied, high and strong. A mob collects, the fray to see: So did Apollo rescue me. 

The Satires appear to have been completed when Horace was aboutthirty-five years old, and published collectively, B. C. 29. By thistime his position in society was well assured. He numbered among hisfriends, as we have seen, the most eminent men in Rome, --

 "Chiefs out of war, and statesmen out of place"--

men who were not merely ripe scholars, but who had borne and werebearing a leading part in the great actions of that memorable epoch. Among such men he would be most at home, for there his wit, hisshrewdness, his genial spirits, and high breeding would be bestappreciated. But his own keen relish of life, and his delight inwatching the lights and shades of human character, took him into thatwider circle where witty and notable men are always eagerly soughtafter to grace the feasts or enliven the heavy splendour of the richand the unlettered. He was still young, and happy in the animalspirits which make the exhausting life of a luxurious capitalendurable even in spite of its pleasures. What Victor Hugo calls

 "Le banquet des amis, et quelquefois les soirs, Le baiser jeune et frais d'une blanche aux yeux noirs, "

never quite lost their charm for him; but during this period they mustoften have tempted him into the elaborate dinners, the late hours, andthe high-strung excitement, which made a retreat to the keen air andplain diet of his Sabine home scarcely less necessary for his body'sthan it was for his spirit's health. For, much as he prized moderationin all things, and extolled "the mirth that after no repenting draws, "good wine, good company, and fair and witty women would be sure towork their spell on a temperament so bright and sympathetic, and toquicken his spirits into a brilliancy and force, dazzling for thehour, but to be paid for next day in headache and depression. 

He was all the more likely to suffer in this way from the very factthat, as a rule, he was simple and frugal in his tastes and habits. Wehave seen him (p. 66), in the early days of his stay in Rome, at his"plain meal of pancakes, pulse, and pease, " served on homelyearthenware. At his farm, again, beans and bacon (p. 80) form hisstaple dish. True to the old Roman taste, he was a great vegetarian, and in his charming ode, written for the opening of the temple ofApollo erected by Augustus on Mount Palatine (B. C. 28), he thinks itnot out of place to mingle with his prayer for poetic power anentreaty that he may never be without wholesome vegetables and fruit. 

 "Let olives, endive, mallows light, Be all my fare; and health Give thou, Apollo, so I might Enjoy my present wealth! Give me but these, I ask no more, These, and a mind entire-- An old age, not unhonoured, nor Unsolaced by the lyre!"

Maecenas himself is promised (Odes, III. 28), if he will visit thepoet at the Sabine farm, "simple dinners neatly dressed;" and whenHorace invites down his friend Torquatus (Epistles, II. 5), he does iton the footing that this wealthy lawyer shall be content to put upwith plain vegetables and homely crockery (_modica olus omnepatella_). The wine, he promises, shall be good, though not of anyof the crack growths. If Torquatus wants better, he must send it downhimself. The appointments of the table, too, though of the simplestkind, shall be admirably kept--

 "The coverlets of faultless sheen, The napkins scrupulously clean, Your cup and salver such that they Unto yourself yourself display. "

Table-service neat to a nicety was obviously a great point withHorace. "What plate he had was made to look its best. " "_Ridetargento domus_"--"My plate, newly-burnished, enlivens my rooms"--isone of the attractions held out in his invitation to the fair Phyllisto grace his table on Maecenas's birthday (Odes, IV. 11). And we maybe very sure that his little dinners were served and waited on withthe studied care and quiet finish of a refined simplicity. His rule onthese matters is indicated by himself (Satires, II. 2):--

 "The proper thing is to be cleanly and nice, And yet so as not to be over precise; To neither be constantly scolding your slaves, Like that old prig Albutus, as losels and knaves, Nor, like Naevius, in such things who's rather too easy, To the guests at your board present water that's greasy. "

To a man of these simple tastes the elaborate banquets, borrowed fromthe Asiatic Greeks, which were then in fashion, must have beenintolerable. He has introduced us to one of them in describing adinner-party of nine given by one Nasidienus, a wealthy snob, toMaecenas and others of Horace's friends. The dinner breaks down in avery amusing way, between the giver's love of display and hisparsimony, which prompted him, on the one hand, to present his guestswith, the fashionable dainties, but, on the other, would not let himpay a price sufficient to secure their being good. The first courseconsists of a Lucanian wild boar, served with a garnish of turnips, radishes, and lettuce, in a sauce of anchovy-brine and wine-lees. Nextcomes an incongruous medley of dishes, including one

 "Of sparrows' gall and turbots' liver, At the mere thought of which I shiver. "

A lamprey succeeds, "floating vast and free, by shrimps surrounded ina sea of sauce, " and this is followed up by a crane soused in salt andflour, the liver of a snow-white goose fattened on figs, leverets'shoulders, and roasted blackbirds. This _menu_ is clearly meantfor a caricature, but it was a caricature of a prevailing folly, whichhad probably cost the poet many an indigestion. 

Against this folly, and the ruin to health and purse which itentailed, some of his most vigorous satire is directed. It furnishesthe themes of the second and fourth Satires of the Second Book, bothof which, with slight modifications, might with equal truth beaddressed to the dinner-givers and diners-out of our own day. In theformer of these the speaker is the Apulian yeoman Ofellus, whoundertakes to show

 "What the virtue consists in, and why it is great, To live on a little, whatever your state. "

Before entering on his task, however, he insists that his hearersshall cut themselves adrift from their luxuries, and come to himfasting, and with appetites whetted by a sharp run with the hounds, astiff bout at tennis, or some other vigorous gymnastics;--

 "And when the hard work has your squeamishness routed, When you're parched up with thirst, and your hunger's undoubted, Then spurn simple food if you can, or plain wine, Which no honied gums from Hymettus refine. "

His homily then proceeds in terms which would not be out of place ifaddressed to a _gourmet_ of modern London or Paris:--

 "When your butler's away, and the weather's so bad That there is not a morsel of fish to be had, A crust with some salt will soothe not amiss The ravening stomach. You ask, how is this? Because for delight, at the best, you must look To yourself, and not to your wealth or your cook [1] Work till you perspire. Of all sauces 'tis best. The man that's with over-indulgence oppressed, White-livered and pursy, can relish no dish, Be it ortolans, oysters, or finest of fish. Still I scarcely can hope, if before you there were A peacock and capon, you would not prefer With the peacock to tickle your palate, you're so Completely the dupes of mere semblance and show. For to buy the rare bird only gold will avail, And he makes a grand show with his fine painted tail. As if this had to do with the matter the least! Can you make of the feathers you prize so a feast? And, when the bird's cooked, what becomes of its splendour? Is his flesh than the capon's more juicy or tender? Mere appearance, not substance, then, clearly it is, Which bamboozles your judgment. So much, then, for this. "

[1] "Pour l'amour de Dieu, un sou pour acheter un petit pain. J'ai si faim!" "Comment!" responded the cloyed sensualist, in search of an appetite, who was thus accosted; "tu as faim, petit drôle! Tu es bien heureux!" The readers of Pope will also remember his lines on the man who "Called 'happy dog' the beggar at his door, And envied thirst and hunger to the poor. "

Don't talk to me of taste, Ofellus continues--

 "Will it give you a notion If this pike in the Tiber was caught, or the ocean? If it used 'twixt the bridges to glide and to quiver, Or was tossed to and fro at the mouth of the river?"

Just as our epicures profess to distinguish, by flavour a salmonfresh, run from the sea from one that has been degenerating for four-and-twenty hours in the fresh water of the river--with thisdifference, however, that, unlike the salmon with us, the above-bridgepike was considered at Rome to be more delicate than his sea-bred andleaner brother. 

Ofellus next proceeds to ridicule the taste which prizes what is setbefore it for mere size or rarity or cost. It is this, he contends, and not any excellence in the things themselves, which makes peopleload their tables with the sturgeon or the stork. Fashion, notflavour, prescribes the rule; indeed, the more perverted her ways, themore sure they are to be followed. 

 "So were any one now to assure us a treat In cormorants roasted, as tender and sweet, The young men of Rome are so prone to what's wrong, They'd eat cormorants all to a man, before long. "

But, continues Ofellus, though I would have you frugal, I would nothave you mean--

 "One vicious extreme it is idle to shun, If into its opposite straightway you run;"

illustrating his proposition by one of those graphic sketches whichgive a distinctive life to Horace's Satires. 

 "There is Avidienus, to whom, like a burr, Sticks the name he was righteously dubbed by, of 'Cur, ' Eats beechmast and olives five years old, at least, And even when he's robed all in white for a feast On his marriage or birth day, or some other very High festival day, when one likes to be merry, What wine from the chill of his cellar emerges-- 'Tis a drop at the best--has the flavour of verjuice; While from a huge cruet his own sparing hand On his coleworts drops oil which no mortal can stand, So utterly loathsome and rancid in smell, it Defies his stale vinegar even to quell it. "

Let what you have he simple, the best of its kind, whatever that maybe, and served in the best style. And now learn, continues the rusticsage, "In what way and how greatly you'll gain By using a diet both sparing and plain. First, your health will be good; for you readily can Believe how much mischief is done to a man By a great mass of dishes, --remembering that Plain fare of old times, and how lightly it sat. But the moment you mingle up boiled with roast meat, And shellfish with thrushes, what tasted so sweet Will be turned into bile, and ferment, not digest, in Your stomach exciting a tumult intestine. Mark, from a bewildering dinner how pale Every man rises up! Nor is this all they ail, For the body, weighed down by its last night's excesses, To its own wretched level the mind, too, depresses, And to earth chains that spark of the essence divine; While he, that's content on plain viands to dine, Sleeps off his fatigues without effort, then gay As a lark rises up to the tasks of the day. Yet he on occasion will find himself able To enjoy without hurt a more liberal table, Say, on festival days, that come round with the year, Or when his strength's low, and cries out for good cheer, Or when, as years gather, his age must be nursed With more delicate care than he wanted at first. But for you, when ill health or old age shall befall, Where's the luxury left, the relief within call, Which has not been forestalled in the days of your prime, When you scoffed, in your strength, at the inroads of time? "'Keep your boar till it's rank!' said our sires; which arose, I am confident, not from their having no nose, But more from the notion that some of their best Should be kept in reserve for the chance of a guest: And though, ere he came, it grew stale on the shelf, This was better than eating all up by one's self. Oh, would I had only on earth found a place In the days of that noble heroic old race!"

So much as a question of mere health and good feeling. But now ourmoralist appeals to higher considerations:--

 "Do you set any store by good name, which we find Is more welcome than song to the ears of mankind? Magnificent turbot, plate richly embossed, Will bring infinite shame with an infinite cost. Add kinsmen and neighbours all furious, your own Disgust with yourself, when you find yourself groan For death, which has shut itself off from your hope, With not even a sou left to buy you a rope. "'Most excellent doctrine!' you answer, 'and would, For people like Trausius, be all very good; But I have great wealth, and an income that brings In enough to provide for the wants of three kings. ' But is this any reason you should not apply Your superfluous wealth to ends nobler, more high? You so rich, why should any good honest man lack? Our temples, why should they be tumbling to wrack? Wretch, of all this great heap have you nothing to spare For our dear native land? Or why should you dare To think that misfortune will never o'ertake you? Oh, then, what a butt would your enemies make you! Who will best meet reverses? The man who, you find, Has by luxuries pampered both body and mind? Or he who, contented with little, and still Looking on to the future, and fearful of ill, Long, long ere a murmur is heard from afar, In peace has laid up the munitions of war?"

Alas for the wisdom, of Ofellus the sage! Nineteen centuries have comeand gone, and the spectacle is still before us of the sameselfishness, extravagance, and folly, which he rebuked so well and sovainly, but pushed to even greater excess, and more widely diffused, enervating the frames and ruining the fortunes of one great section ofsociety, and helping to inspire another section, and that a dangerousone, with angry disgust at the hideous contrast between the oppositeextremes of wretchedness and luxury which everywhere meets the eye inthe great cities of the civilised world. 

In the fourth Satire of the Second Book, Horace ridicules, in a veinof exquisite irony, the _gourmets_ of his day, who made aphilosophy of flavours, with whom sauces were a science, and who hadcondensed into aphorisms the merits of the poultry, game, or fish ofthe different and often distant regions from which they were broughtto Rome. Catius has been listening to a dissertation by some Brillât-Savarin of this class, and is hurrying home to commit to his tabletsthe precepts by which he professes himself to have been immenselystruck, when he is met by Horace, and prevailed upon to repeat some ofthem in the very words of this philosopher of the dinner-table. Exceedingly curious they are, throwing no small light both upon thematerials of the Roman cuisine and upon the treatment by the Romans oftheir wines. Being delivered, moreover, with the epigrammaticprecision of philosophical axioms, their effect is infinitely amusing. Thus:--

 "Honey Aufidius mixed with strong Falernian; he was very wrong. "

 "The flesh of kid is rarely fine, That has been chiefly fed on vine. "

 "To meadow mushrooms give the prize, And trust no others, if you're wise. "

 "Till I had the example shown, The art was utterly unknown Of telling, when you taste a dish, The age and kind of bird or fish. "

Horace professes to be enraptured at the depth of sagacity and beautyof expression in what he hears, and exclaims, --

 "Oh, learned Catius, prithee, by Our friendship, by the gods on high, Take me along with you, to hear Such wisdom, be it far or near! For though you tell me all--in fact, Your memory is most exact-- Still there must be some grace of speech, Which no interpreter can reach. The look, too, of the man, the mien! Which you, what fortune! having seen, May for that very reason deem Of no account; but to the stream, Even at its very fountain-head, I fain would have my footsteps led, That, stooping, I may drink my fill, Where such life-giving saws distil. "

Manifestly the poet was no gastronome, or he would not have dealt thussarcastically with matters so solemn and serious as the gusts, andflavours, and "sacred rage" of a highly-educated appetite. At the sametime, there is no reason to suppose him to have been insensible to theattractions of the "_haute cuisine_, " as developed by the geniusof the Vattel or Francatelli of Maecenas, and others of his wealthyfriends. Indeed, he appears to have been prone, rather than otherwise, to attack these with a relish, which his feeble digestion had frequentreason to repent. His servant Davus more than hints as much in thepassage above quoted (p. 83); and the consciousness of his own frailtymay have given additional vigour to his assaults on the ever-increasing indulgence in the pleasures of the table, which he sawgaining ground so rapidly around him. 

CHAPTER VI. 

HORACE'S LOVE POETRY. 

When young, Horace threw himself ardently into the pleasures of youth;and his friends being, for the most part, young and rich, theirbanquets were sure to be sumptuous, and carried far into the night. Nor in these days did the "_blanche aux yeux noirs_, " whosebeauty and accomplishments formed the crowning grace of mostbachelors' parties, fail to engage a liberal share of his attention. He tells us as much himself (Epistles, I. 14), when contrasting to thesteward of his farm the tastes of his maturer years with the habits ofhis youth. 

 "He, whom fine clothes became, and glistering hair, Whom Cinara welcomed, that rapacious fair, As well you know, for his own simple sake, Who on from noon would wine in bumpers take, Now quits the table soon, and loves to dream And drowse upon the grass beside a stream, "

adding, with a sententious brevity which it is hopeless to imitate, "_Nec lusisse pudet, sed non incidere ludum_, "--

 "Nor blushes that of sport he took his fill; He'd blush, indeed, to be tomfooling still. "

Again, when lamenting how little the rolling years have left him ofhis past (Epistles, II. 2), his regrets are for the "_Venerem, convivia, ludum_, " to which he no longer finds himself equal--

 "Years following years steal something every day, Love, feasting, frolic, fun, they've swept away;"--

and to the first of these, life "in his hot youth" manifestly owedmuch of its charm. 

To beauty he would appear to have been always susceptible, but his wasthe lightly-stirred susceptibility which is an affair of the sensesrather than of the soul. "There is in truth, " says Rochefoucauld, "only one kind of love; but there are a thousand different copies ofit. " Horace, so far at least as we can judge from his poetry, was nostranger to the spurious form of the passion, but his whole being hadnever been penetrated by the genuine fire. The goddess of his worshipis not Venus Urania, pale, dreamy, spiritual, but _Erycina ridens, quam Jocus circum volat et Cupido, _ who comes

 "With laughter in her eyes, and Love And Glee around her flying. "

Accordingly, of all those infinitely varied chords of deep emotion andimaginative tenderness, of which occasional traces are to be found inthe literature of antiquity, and with which modern poetry, from Danteto Tennyson, is familiar, no hint is to be found in his pages. Hisdeepest feeling is at best but a ferment of the blood; it is never theall-absorbing devotion of the heart. He had learned by his ownexperience just enough of the tender passion to enable him to writepretty verses about it, and to rally, not unsympathetically, such ofhis friends as had not escaped so lightly from the flame. Therefore itis that, as has been truly said, "his love-ditties are, as it were, like flowers, beautiful in form and rich in hues, but without thescent that breathes to the heart. " We seek in them in vain for thetenderness, the negation of self, the passion and the pathos, whichare the soul of all true love-poetry. 

At the same time, Horace had a subtle appreciation of the beauty andgrace, the sweetness and the fascination, of womanhood. Poet as hewas, he must have delighted to contemplate the ideal elevation andpurity of woman, as occasionally depicted in the poetry of Greece, andof which he could scarcely fail to have had some glimpses in reallife. Nay, he paints (Odes, III. 11) the devotion of Hypermnestra forher husband's sake "magnificently false" (_splendide mendax_) tothe promise which, with her sister Danaids, she had given to herfather, in a way that proves he was not incapable of appreciating, andeven of depicting, the purer and higher forms of female worth. Butthis exquisite portrait stands out in solitary splendour among theLydes and Lalages, the Myrtales, Phrynes, and Glyceras of his otherpoems. These ladies were types of the class with which, probably, hewas most familiar, those brilliant and accomplished _hetairae_, generally Greeks, who were trained up in slavery with every art andaccomplishment which could heighten their beauty or lend a charm totheir society. Always beautiful, and by force of their very positionframed to make themselves attractive, these "weeds of gloriousfeature, " naturally enough, took the chief place in the regards of menof fortune, in a state of society where marriage was not an affair ofthe heart but of money or connection, and where the wife so chosenseems to have been at pains to make herself more attractive toeverybody rather than to her husband. Here and there these Aspasiasmade themselves a distinguished position, and occupied a place withtheir protector nearly akin to that of wife. But in the ordinary waytheir reign over any one heart was shortlived, and their career, though splendid, was brief, --a youth of folly, a premature old age ofsqualor and neglect. Their habits were luxurious and extravagant. Indress they outvied the splendour, not insignificant, of the Romanmatrons; and they might be seen courting the admiration of the wealthyloungers of Rome by dashing along the Appian Way behind a team ofspirited ponies driven by themselves. These things were often paid forout of the ruin of their admirers. Their society, while in the bloomand freshness of their charms, was greatly sought after, for wit andsong came with them to the feast. Even Cicero, then well up in years, finds a pleasant excuse (Familiar Letters, IX. 26) for enjoying till alate hour the society of one Cytheris, a lady of the class, at thehouse of Volumnius Eutrapelus, her protector. His friend Atticus waswith him; and although Cicero finds some excuse necessary, it is stillobvious that even grave and sober citizens might dine in suchequivocal company without any serious compromise of character. 

It was perhaps little to be wondered at that Horace did not squanderhis heart upon women of this class. His passions were too wellcontrolled, and his love of ease too strong, to admit of his beingcarried away by the headlong impulses of a deeply-seated devotion. This would probably have been the case even had the object of hispassion been worthy of an unalloyed regard. As it was, "His loves were like most other loves, A little glow, a little shiver;"

and if he sometimes had, like the rest of mankind, to pay his homageto the universal passion by "sighing upon his midnight pillow" for theregards of a mistress whom he could not win, or who had played himfalse, he was never at a loss to find a balm for his wounds elsewhere. He was not the man to nurse the bitter-sweet sorrows of the heart--towrite, and to feel, like Burns--

 "'Tis sweeter for thee despairing, Than aught in the world beside. "

_Parabilem amo Venerem facilemque_, "Give me the beauty that isnot too coy, " is the Alpha and Omega of his personal creed. How shouldit have been otherwise? Knowing woman chiefly, as he obviously did, only in the ranks of the _demi-monde_, he was not likely toregard the fairest face, after the first heyday of his youth was past, as worth the pain its owner's caprices could inflict. For, as seenunder that phase, woman was apt to be both mercenary and capricious;and if the poet suffered, as he did, from the fickleness of more thanone mistress, the probability is--and this he was too honest not tofeel--that they had only forestalled him in inconstancy. 

If Horace ever had a feeling which deserved the name of love, it wasfor the Cinara mentioned in the lines above quoted. She belonged tothe class of hetairae, but seems to have preferred him, from a genuinefeeling of affection, to her wealthier lovers. Holding him as she didcompletely under her thraldom, it was no more than natural that sheshould have played with his emotions, keeping him between ecstasy andtorture, as such a woman, especially if her own heart were alsosomewhat engaged, would delight to do with a man in whose love shemust have rejoiced as something to lean upon amid the sad frivolitiesof her life. The exquisite pain to which her caprices occasionallysubjected him was more than he could bear in silence, and drove him, despite his quick sense of the ridiculous, into lachrymose avowals toMaecenas of his misery over his wine, which were, doubtless, no smallsource of amusement to the easy-going statesman, before his wifeTerentia had taught him by experience what infinite torture a charmingand coquettish woman has it in her power to inflict. Long yearsafterwards, when he is well on to fifty, Horace reminds his friend(Epistles, I. 7) of

 "The woes blabbed o'er our wine, when Cinara chose To tease me, cruel flirt--ah, happy woes!"--

words in which lurks a subtle undercurrent of pathos, like that inSophie Arnould's exclamation in Le Brun's Epigram, --

 "Oh, le bon temps! J'etais bien malheureuse!"

Twice also in his later odes (IV. 1 and 13), Horace recurs withtenderness to the "gentle Cinara" as having held the paramount placein his heart. She was his one bit of romance, and this all the morethat she died young. _Cinarae breves annos fata dederunt_--"Fewyears the fates to Cinara allowed;" and in his meditative rambles bythe Digentia, the lonely poet, we may well believe, often foundhimself sighing "for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of avoice that is still. "

In none of his love-poems is the ring of personal feeling moreperceptible than in the following. It is one of his earliest, and ifwe are to identify the Neaera to whom it is addressed with the Neaerareferred to in Ode 14, Book III. , it must have been written _ConsulePlanco_, that is, in the year of Horace's return to Rome after thebattle of Philippi. --

 "'Twas night!--let me recall to thee that night! The silver moon in the unclouded sky Amid the lesser stars was shining bright, When, in the words I did adjure thee by, Thou with thy clinging arms, more tightly knit Around me than the ivy clasps the oak, Didst breathe a vow--mocking the gods with it-- A vow which, false one, thou hast foully broke; That while the ravening wolf should hunt the flocks, The shipman's foe, Orion, vex the sea, And zephyrs waft the unshorn Apollo's locks, So long wouldst thou be fond, be true to me!

 "Yet shall thy heart, Neaera, bleed for this, For if in Flaccus aught of man remain, Give thou another joys that once were his, Some other maid more true shall soothe his pain; Nor think again to lure him to thy heart! The pang once felt, his love is past recall; And thou, more favoured youth, whoe'er thou art, Who revell'st now in triumph o'er his fall, Though thou be rich in land and golden store, In lore a sage, with shape framed to beguile, Thy heart shall ache when, this brief fancy o'er, She seeks a new love, and I calmly smile. "

This is the poetry of youth, the passion of wounded vanity; but it isclearly the product of a strong personal feeling--a feeling which hasmore often found expression in poetry than the higher emotions ofthose with whom "love is love for evermore, " and who have infinitepity, but no rebuke, for faithlessness. The lines have been oftenimitated; and in Sir Robert Aytoun's poem on "Woman's Inconstancy, "the imitation has a charm not inferior to the original. 

 "Yet do thou glory in thy choice, Thy choice of his good fortune boast; I'll neither grieve nor yet rejoice To see him gain what I have lost;

 The height of my disdain shall be To laugh at him, to blush for thee; To love thee still, yet go no more A-begging to a beggar's door. "

Note how Horace deals with the same theme in his Ode to Pyrrha, famousin Milton's overrated translation, and the difference between theyoung man writing under the smart of wounded feeling and the poet, calmly though intensely elaborating his subject as a work of art, becomes at once apparent. 

 "Pyrrha, what slender boy, in perfume steeped, Doth in the shade of some delightful grot Caress thee now on couch with roses heaped? For whom dost thou thine amber tresses knot

 "With all thy seeming-artless grace? Ah me, How oft will he thy perfidy bewail, And joys all flown, and shudder at the sea Rough with the chafing of the blust'rous gale, "Who now, fond dreamer, revels in thy charms; Who, all unweeting how the breezes veer, Hopes still to find a welcome in thine arms As warm as now, and thee as loving-dear!

 "Ah, woe for those on whom thy spell is flung! My votive tablet, in the temple set, Proclaims that I to ocean's god have hung The vestments in my shipwreck smirched and wet. "

It may be that among Horace's odes some were directly inspired by theladies to whom they are addressed; but it is time that moderncriticism should brush away all the elaborate nonsense which has beenwritten to demonstrate that Pyrrha, Chloe, Lalage, Lydia, Lyde, Leuconoë, Tyndaris, Glycera, and Barine, not to mention others, werereal personages to whom the poet was attached. At this rate hisoccupations must have rather been those of a Don Giovanni than of aman of studious habits and feeble health, who found it hard enough tokeep pace with the milder dissipations of the social circle. We areabsolutely without any information as to these ladies, whose liquidand beautiful names are almost poems in themselves; nevertheless themost wonderful romances have been spun about them out of the innerconsciousness of the commentators. Who would venture to deal in thisway with the Eleanore, and "rare pale Margaret, " and Cousin Amy, of MrTennyson? And yet to do so would be quite as reasonable as toconclude, as some critics have done, that such a poem as the following(Odes, I. 23) was not a graceful poetical exercise merely, but aserious appeal to the object of a serious passion:--

 "Nay, hear me, dearest Chloe, pray! You shun me like a timid fawn, That seeks its mother all the day By forest brake and upland, lawn, Of every passing breeze afraid, And leaf that twitters in the glade. 

 "Let but the wind with sudden rush The whispers of the wood awake, Or lizard green disturb the hush, Quick-darting through the grassy brake, The foolish frightened thing will start, With trembling knees and beating heart. [1]

 "But I am neither lion fell Nor tiger grim to work you woe; I love you, sweet one, much too well, Then cling not to your mother so, But to a lover's fonder arms Confide your ripe and rosy charms. "

[1] The same idea has been beautifully worked out by Spenser, in whom, and in Milton, the influence of Horace's poetry is perhaps more frequently traceable than in any of our poets:--

 "Like as an hynde forth singled from the herde, That hath escaped from a ravenous beast, Yet flies away, of her own feet afearde; And every leaf, that shaketh with the least Murmure of winde, her terror hath encreast; So fled fayre Florimel from her vaine feare, Long after she from perill was releast; Each shade she saw, and each noyse she did heare, Did seeme to be the same, which she escaypt whileare. " Fairy Queen, III. Vii. 1. 

Such a poem as this, one should have supposed, might have escaped theimputation of being dictated by mere personal desire. But no; even soacute a critic as Walckenaer will have it that Chloe was one ofHorace's many mistresses, to whom he fled for consolation when Lydia, another of them, played him false, "et qu'il l'a recherchée avecempressement. " And his sole ground for this conclusion is thecircumstance that a Chloe is mentioned in this sense in the famousDialogue, in which Horace and Lydia have quite gratuitously beenassumed to be the speakers. That is to say, he first assumes that thedialogue is not a mere exercise of fancy, but a serious fact, and, having got so far, concludes as a matter of course that the Chloe ofthe one ode is the Chloe of the other! "The ancients, " as Buttmann haswell said, "had the skill to construct such poems so that each speechtells us by whom it is spoken; but we let the editors treat us all ourlives as schoolboys, and interline such dialogues, as we do our plays, with the names. Even in an English poem we should be offended atseeing Collins by the side of Phyllis. " Read without the prepossessionwhich the constant mention of it as a dialogue between Horace andLydia makes it difficult to avoid, the Ode commends itself merely as apiece of graceful fancy. Real feeling is the last thing one looks forin two such excessively well-bred and fickle personages as thespeakers. Their pouting and reconciliation make very pretty fooling, such as might be appropriate in the wonderful beings who people thegarden landscapes of Watteau. But where are the fever and the strongpulse of passion which, in less ethereal mortals, would be proper tosuch a theme? Had there been a real lady in the case, the tone wouldhave been less measured, and the strophes less skilfully balanced. 

 "HE. --Whilst I was dear and thou wert kind, And I, and I alone, might lie Upon thy snowy breast reclined, Not Persia's king so blest as I. 

 SHE. --Whilst I to thee was all in all, Nor Chloë might with Lydia vie, Renowned in ode or madrigal, Not Roman Ilia famed as I. 

 HE. --I now am Thracian Chloë's slave, With hand and voice that charms the air, For whom even death itself I'd brave, So fate the darling girl would spare!

 SHE. --I dote on Calaïs--and I Am all his passion, all his care, For whom a double death I'd die, So fate the darling boy would spare!

 HE. --What, if our ancient love return, And bind us with a closer tie, If I the fair-haired Chloë spurn, And as of old, for Lydia sigh?

 SHE. --Though lovelier than yon star is he, And lighter thou than cork--ah why? More churlish, too, than Adria's sea, With thee I'd live, with thee I'd die!"

In this graceful trifle Horace is simply dealing with one of thecommonplaces of poetry, most probably only transplanting a Greekflower into the Latin soil. There is more of the vigour of originalityand of living truth in the following ode to Bariné (II. 8), where hegives us a cameo portrait, carved with exquisite finish, of that_beauté de diable_, "dallying and dangerous, " as Charles Lambcalled Peg Woffington's, and, what hers was not, heartless, whichnever dies out of the world. A real person, Lord Lytton thinks, "wascertainly addressed, and in a tone which, to such a person, would havebeen the most exquisite flattery; and as certainly the person is notso addressed by a lover"--a criticism which, coming from such anobserver, outweighs the opposite conclusions of a score of pedanticscholars:--

 "If for thy perjuries and broken truth, Bariné, thou hadst ever come to harm, Hadst lost, but in a nail or blackened tooth, One single charm, "I'd trust thee; but when thou art most forsworn, Thou blazest forth with beauty most supreme, And of our young men art, noon, night, and morn, The thought, the dream. 

 "To thee 'tis gain thy mother's dust to mock, To mock the silent watchfires of the night, All heaven, the gods, on whom death's icy shock Can never light. 

 "Smiles Venus' self, I vow, to see thy arts, The guileless Nymphs and cruel Cupid smile, And, smiling, whets on bloody stone his darts Of fire the while. 

 "Nay more, our youth grow up to be thy prey, New slaves throng round, and those who crouched at first, Though oft they threaten, leave not for a day Thy roof accurst. 

 "Thee mothers for their unfledged younglings dread; Thee niggard old men dread, and brides new-made, In misery, lest their lords neglect their bed, By thee delayed. "

Horace is more at home in playful raillery of the bewildering effectsof love upon others, than in giving expression to its emotions as feltby himself. In the fourteenth Epode, it is true, he begs Maecenas toexcuse his failure to execute some promised poem, because he is socompletely upset by his love for a certain naughty Phryne that hecannot put a couple of lines together. Again, he tells us (Odes, I. 19) into what a ferment his whole being has been thrown, long after hehad thought himself safe from such emotions, by the marble-like sheenof Glycera's beauty--her _grata protervitas, et voltus nimiumlubricus adspici_--

 "Her pretty, pert, provoking ways, And face too fatal-fair to see. "

The first Ode of the Fourth Book is a beautiful fantasia on a similartheme. He paints, too, the tortures of jealousy with the vigour (Odes, I. 13) of a man who knew something of them:--

 "Then reels my brain, then on my cheek The shifting colour comes and goes, And tears, that flow unbidden, speak The torture of my inward throes, The fierce unrest, the deathless flame, That slowly macerates my frame. "

And when rallying his friend Tibullus (Odes, I. 23) about his dolefulditties on the fickleness of his mistress Glycera, he owns to havinghimself suffered terribly in the same way. But despite all this, it isvery obvious that if love has, in Rosalind's phrase, "clapped him onthe shoulder, " the little god left him "heart-whole. " Being, as it is, the source of the deepest and strongest emotions, love presents manyaspects for the humorist, and perhaps to no one more than to him whohas felt it intensely. Horace may or may not have sounded the depthsof the passion in his own person; but, in any case, a fellow-feelingfor the lover's pleasures and pains served to infuse a tone ofkindliness into his ridicule. How charming in this way is the Ode toLydia (I. 8), of which the late Henry Luttrel's once popular and stilldelightful 'Letters to Julia' is an elaborate paraphrase!--

 "Why, Lydia, why, I pray, by all the gods above, Art so resolved that Sybaris should die, And all for love?

 "Why doth he shun The Campus Martius' sultry glare? He that once recked of neither dust nor sun, Why rides he there, "First of the brave, Taming the Gallic steed no more? Why doth he shrink from Tiber's yellow wave? Why thus abhor

 "The wrestlers' oil, As 'twere from viper's tongue distilled? Why do his arms no livid bruises soil, He, once so skilled, "The disc or dart Far, far beyond the mark to hurl? And tell me, tell me, in what nook apart, Like baby-girl, "Lurks the poor boy, Veiling his manhood, as did Thetis' son, To 'scape war's bloody clang, while fated Troy Was yet undone?"

In the same class with this poem may be ranked the following ode (I. 27). Just as the poet has made us as familiar with the lovelornSybaris as if we knew him, so does he here transport us into themiddle of a wine-party of young Romans, with that vivid dramatic forcewhich constitutes one great source of the excellence of his lyrics. 

 "Hold! hold! 'Tis for Thracian madmen to fight With wine-cups, that only were made for delight. 'Tis barbarous-brutal! I beg of you all, Disgrace not our banquet with bloodshed and brawl!

 "Sure, Median scimitars strangely accord With lamps and with wine at the festival board! 'Tis out of all rule! Friends, your places resume, And let us have order once more in the room!

 "If I am to join you in pledging a beaker Of this stout Falernian, choicest of liquor, Megilla's fair brother must say, from what eyes Flew the shaft, sweetly fatal, that causes his sighs. 

 "How--dumb! Then I drink not a drop. Never blush, Whoever the fair one may be, man! Tush, tush! She'll do your taste credit, I'm certain--for yours Was always select in its little amours. 

 "Don't be frightened! We're all upon honour, you know, So out with your tale!--Gracious powers! Is it so? Poor fellow! Your lot has gone sadly amiss, When you fell into such a Charybdis as this!

 "What witch, what magician, with drinks and with charms, What god can effect your release from her harms? So fettered, scarce Pegasus' self, were he near you, From the fangs of this triple Chimaera would clear you. "

In this poem, which has all the effect of an impromptu, we have a_genre_ picture of Roman life, as vivid as though painted by thepencil of Couture or Gerôme. 

Serenades were as common an expedient among the Roman gallants of thedays of Augustus as among their modern successors. In the fine climateof Greece, Italy, and Spain, they were a natural growth, and involvedno great strain upon a wooer's endurance. They assume a very differentaspect under a northern sky, where young Absolute, found by his LydiaLanguish "in the garden, in the coldest night in January, stuck like adripping statue, " presents a rather lugubrious spectacle. Horace(Odes, III. 7) warns the fair Asteriè, during the absence of herhusband abroad, to shut her ears against the musical nocturnes of acertain Enipeus:--

 "At nightfall shut your doors, nor then. Look down into the street again, When quavering fifes complain;"

using almost the words of Shylock to his daughter Jessica:--

 "Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum _And the vile squeaking of the wrynecked fife_, Clamber not you up to the casement then, Nor thrust your head into the public street. "

The name given to such a serenade, adopted probably, with theserenades themselves, from Greece, was _paraclausithyron_--literally, an out-of-door lament. Here is a specimen of what they were(Odes, III. 10), in which, under the guise of imitating their form, Horace quietly makes a mock of the absurdity of the practice. Hisserenader has none of the insensibility to the elements of the loverin the Scotch song:--

 "Wi' the sleet in my hair, I'd gang ten miles and mair, For a word o' that sweet lip o' thine, o' thine, For ae glance o' thy dark e'e divine. "

Neither is there in his pleading the tone of earnest entreaty whichmarks the wooer, in a similar plight, of Burns's "Let me in this aenicht"--

 "Thou hear'st the winter wind and weet, Nae star blinks through the driving sleet; Tak pity on my weary feet, And shield me frae the rain, jo. "

There can be no mistake as to the seriousness of this appeal. Horace'sis a mere _jeu-d'esprit_:--

 "Though your drink were Tanais, chillest of rivers, And your lot with some conjugal savage were cast, You would pity, sweet Lycè, the poor soul that shivers Out here at your door in the merciless blast. 

 "Only hark how the doorway goes straining and creaking, And the piercing wind pipes through the trees that surround The court of your villa, while Hack frost is streaking With ice the crisp snow that lies thick on the ground!

 "In your pride--Venus hates it--no longer envelop ye, Or haply you'll find yourself laid on the shelf; You never were made for a prudish Penelope, 'Tis not in the blood of your sires or yourself. 

 "Though nor gifts nor entreaties can win a soft answer, Nor the violet pale of my love-ravaged cheek, To your husband's intrigue with a Greek ballet-dancer, Though you still are blind, and forgiving and meek;

 "Yet be not as cruel--forgive my upbraiding-- As snakes, nor as hard as the toughest of oak; To stand out here, drenched to the skin, serenading All night may in time prove too much of a joke. "

It is not often that Horace's poetry is vitiated by bad taste. Strangely enough, almost the only instances of it occur where he iswriting of women, as in the Ode to Lydia (Book I. 25) and to Lyce(Book IV. 13). Both ladies seem to have been, former favourites ofhis, and yet the burden of these poems is exultation in the decay oftheir charms. The deadening influence of mere sensuality, and of theprevalent low tone of morals, must indeed have been great, when a man"so singularly susceptible, " as Lord Lytton has truly described him, "to amiable, graceful, gentle, and noble impressions of man and oflife, " could write of a woman whom he had once loved in a strain likethis:--

 "The gods have heard, the gods have heard my prayer; Yes, Lyce! you are growing old, and still You struggle to look fair; You drink, and dance, and trill Your songs to youthful love, in accents weak With wine, and age, and passion. Youthful Love! He dwells in Chia's cheek, And hears her harp-strings move. Rude boy, he flies like lightning o'er the heath Past withered trees like you; you're wrinkled now; The white has left your teeth, And settled on your brow. Your Coan silks, your jewels bright as stars-- Ah no! they bring not back the days of old, In public calendars By flying time enrolled. Where now that beauty? Where those movements? Where That colour? What of her, of her is left, Who, breathing Love's own air, Me of myself bereft, Who reigned in Cinara's stead, a fair, fair face, Queen of sweet arts? But Fate to Cinara gave A life of little space; And now she cheats the grave Of Lyce, spared to raven's length of days, That youth may see, with laughter and disgust, A firebrand, once ablaze, Now smouldering in grey dust. "

What had this wretched Lyce done that Horace should have prayed thegods to strip her of her charms, and to degrade her from a haughtybeauty into a maudlin hag, disgusting and ridiculous? Why cast suchvery merciless stones at one who, by his own avowal, had erewhilewitched his very soul from him? Why rejoice to see this once beautifulcreature the scoff of all the heartless young fops of Rome? If she hadinjured him, what of that? Was it so very strange that a womantrained, like all the class to which she belonged, to be the playthingof man's caprice, should have been fickle, mercenary, or evenheartless? Poor Lyce might at least have claimed his silence, if hecould not do, what Thackeray says every honest fellow should do, "think well of the woman he has once thought well of, and remember herwith kindness and tenderness, as a man remembers a place where he hasbeen very happy. "

Horace's better self comes out in his playful appeal to his friendXanthias (Odes, II. 4) not to be ashamed of having fallen in love withhis handmaiden Phyllis. That she is a slave is a matter of no account. A girl of such admirable qualities must surely come of a good stock, and is well worth any man's love. Did not Achilles succumb to Briseis, Ajax to Tecmessa, Agamemnon himself to Cassandra? Moreover, "For aught that you know, the fair Phyllis may be The shoot of some highly respectable stem; Nay, she counts, never doubt it, some kings in her tree, And laments the lost acres once lorded by them. Never think that a creature so exquisite grew In the haunts where but vice and dishonour are known, Nor deem that a girl so unselfish, so true, Had a mother 'twould shame thee to take for thine own. "

Here we have the true Horace; and after all these fascinating butdoubtful Lydés, Neaeras, and Pyrrhas, it is pleasant to come across ayoung beauty like this Phyllis, _sic fidelem, sic lucro aversam_. She, at least, is a fresh and fragrant violet among the languoroushothouse splendours of the Horatian garden. 

Domestic love, which plays so large a part in modern poetry, is atheme rarely touched on in Roman verse. Hence we know but little ofthe Romans in their homes--for such a topic used to be thought beneaththe dignity of history--and especially little of the women, whopresided over what have been called "the tender and temperate honoursof the hearth. " The ladies who flourish in the poetry and also in thehistory of those times, however conspicuous for beauty or attraction, are not generally of the kind that make home happy. Such matrons as wechiefly read of there would in the present day he apt to figure in thedivorce court. Nor is the explanation of this difficult. Theprevalence of marriage for mere wealth or connection, and the facilityof divorce, which made the marriage-tie almost a farce among the upperclasses, had resulted, as it could not fail to do, in a greatdebasement of morals. A lady did not lose caste either by beingdivorced, or by seeking divorce, from husband after husband. And aswives in the higher ranks often held the purse-strings, they madethemselves pretty frequently more dreaded than beloved by their lords, through being tyrannical, if not unchaste, or both. So at least Horaceplainly indicates (Odes, III. 24), when contrasting the vices of Romewith the simpler virtues of some of the nations that were under itssway. In those happier lands, he says, "_Nec dotata regit virumconjux, nec nitido fidit adultero_"--

 "No dowried dame her spouse O'erbears, nor trusts the sleek seducer's vows. "

But it would be as wrong to infer from this that the taint wasuniversal, as it would be to gauge our own social morality by theerratic matrons and fast young ladies with whom satirical essayistsdelight to point their periods. The human heart is stronger than thecorruptions of luxury, even among the luxurious and the rich; and thelife of struggle and privation which is the life of the mass of everynation would have been intolerable but for the security and peace ofwell-ordered and happy households. Sweet honest love, cemented byyears of sympathy and mutual endurance, was then, as ever, the salt ofhuman life. Many a monumental inscription, steeped in the tenderestpathos, assures us of the fact. What, for example, must have been thehome of the man who wrote on his wife's tomb, "She never caused me apang but when she died!" And Catullus, mere man of pleasure as he was, must have had strongly in his heart the thought of what a tender andpure-souled woman had been in his friend's home, when he wrote hisexquisite lines to Calvus on the death of Quinctilia:--

 "Calvus, if those now silent in the tomb Can feel the touch of pleasure in our tears For those we loved, that perished in their bloom, And the departed friends of former years-- Oh, then, full surely thy Quinctilia's woe For the untimely fate, that bids thee part, Will fade before the bliss she feels to know How very dear she is unto thy heart!"

Horace, the bachelor, revered the marriage-tie, and did his best, byhis verses, to forward the policy of Augustus in his effort to arrestthe decay of morals by enforcing the duty of marriage, which the well-to-do Romans of that day were inclined to shirk whenever they could. Nay, the charm of constancy and conjugal sympathy inspired a few ofhis very finest lines (Odes, I. L3)--"_Felices ter et amplius, quosirrupta tenet copula_, " &c. , --the feeling of which is betterpreserved in Moore's well-known paraphrase than is possible in meretranslation:--

 "There's a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told, When two that are linked in one heavenly tie, With heart never changing, and brow never cold, Love on through all ills, and love on till they die! One hour of a passion so sacred is worth Whole ages of heartless and wandering bliss; And oh! if there be an Elysium on earth, It is this, it is this!"

To leave the _placens uxor_--"the winsome wife"--behind, is oneof the saddest regrets, Horace tells his friend Posthumus (Odes, II. 14), which death can baring. Still Horace only sang the praises ofmarriage, contenting himself with painting the Eden within which, forreasons unknown to us, he never sought to enter. He was well up inlife, probably, before these sager views dawned upon him. Was it thentoo late to reduce his precepts to practice, or was he unable toovercome his dread of the _dotata conjux_, and thought hiscomfort would be safer in the hands of some less exacting fair, suchas the Phyllis to whom the following Ode, one of his latest (IV. 11), is addressed?--

 "I have laid in a cask of Albanian wine, Which nine mellow summers have ripened and more; In my garden, dear Phyllis, thy brows to entwine, Grows the brightest of parsley in plentiful store. There is ivy to gleam on thy dark glossy hair; My plate, newly burnished, enlivens my rooms; And the altar, athirst for its victim, is there, Enwreathed with chaste vervain and choicest of blooms. 

 "Every hand in the household is busily toiling, And hither and thither boys bustle and girls; Whilst, up from the hearth-fires careering and coiling, The smoke round the rafter-beams languidly curls. Let the joys of the revel be parted between us! 'Tis the Ides of young April, the day which divides The month, dearest Phyllis, of ocean-sprung Venus, A day to me dearer than any besides. 

 "And well may I prize it, and hail its returning-- My own natal-day not more hallowed nor dear; For Maecenas, my friend, dates from this happy morning The life which has swelled to a lustrous career. You sigh for young Telephus: better forget him! His rank is not yours, and the gaudier charms Of a girl that's both wealthy and wanton benet him, And hold him the fondest of slaves in her arms. 

 "Remember fond Phaëthon's fiery sequel, And heavenward-aspiring Bellerophon's fate; And pine not for one who would ne'er be your equal, But level your hopes to a lowlier mate. So, come, my own Phyllis, my heart's latest treasure-- For ne'er for another this bosom shall long-- And I'll teach, while your loved voice re-echoes the measure, How to charm away care with the magic of song. "

This is very pretty and picturesque; and Maecenas was sure to becharmed with it as a birthday Ode, for such it certainly was, whetherthere was any real Phyllis in the case or not. Most probably there wasnot, --the allusion to Telephus, the lady-killer, is so very like manyother allusions of the same kind in other Odes, which are plainly mereexercises of fancy, and the protestation that the lady is the very, very last of his loves, so precisely what all middle-aged gentlementhink it right to say, whose "_jeunesse_, " like the poet's, hasteen notoriously "_orageuse_. "

It was probably not within the circle of his city friends that Horacesaw the women for whom he entertained the deepest respect, but by thehearth-fire in the farmhouse, "the homely house, that harbours quietrest, " with which he was no less familiar, where people lived in asimple and natural way, and where, if anywhere, good wives and motherswere certain to be found. It was manifestly by some woman of thisclass that the following poem (Odes, III. 23) was inspired:--

 "If thou, at each new moon, thine upturned palms, My rustic Phidyle, to heaven shalt lift, The Lares soothe with steam of fragrant balms, A sow, and fruits new-plucked, thy simple gift, "Nor venomed blast shall nip thy fertile vine, Nor mildew blight thy harvest in the ear; Nor shall thy flocks, sweet nurslings, peak and pine, When apple-bearing Autumn chills the year. 

 "The victim marked for sacrifice, that feeds On snow-capped Algidus, in leafy lane Of oak and ilex, or on Alba's meads, With its rich blood the pontiff's axe may stain;

 "Thy little gods for humbler tribute call Than blood of many victims; twine for them Of rosemary a simple coronal, And the lush myrtle's frail and fragrant stem. 

 "The costliest sacrifice that wealth can make From the incensed Penates less commands A soft response, than doth the poorest cake, If on the altar laid with spotless hands. "

When this was written, Horace had got far beyond the Epicurean creedof his youth. He had come to believe in the active intervention of aSupreme Disposer of events in the government of the world, --"_insignem attenuans, obscura promens_" (Odes, I. 34):--

 "The mighty ones of earth o'erthrowing, Advancing the obscure;"--

and to whose "pure eyes and perfect witness" a blameless life and aconscience void of offence were not indifferent. 

CHAPTER VII. 

HORACE'S POEMS TO HIS FRIENDS. --HIS PRAISES OF CONTENTMENT. 

If it be merely the poet, and not the lover, who speaks in most ofHorace's love verses, there can never be any doubt that the poems tohis friends come direct from his heart. They glow with feeling. Towhatever chord they are attuned, sad, or solemn, or joyous, they arealways delightful; consummate in their grace of expression, while theyhave all the warmth and easy flow of spontaneous emotion. Take, forexample, the following (Odes, II. 7). Pompeius Varus, a fellow-studentwith Horace at Athens, and a brother in arms under Brutus, who, afterthe defeat of Philippi, had joined the party of the younger Pompey, has returned to Rome, profiting probably by the general amnestygranted by Octavius to his adversaries after the battle of Actium. Howhis heart must have leapt at such a welcome from his poet-friend asthis!--

 "Dear comrade in the days when thou and I With Brutus took the field, his perils bore, Who hath restored thee, freely as of yore, To thy home gods, and loved Italian sky, "Pompey, who wert the first my heart to share, With whom full oft I've sped the lingering day, Quaffing bright wine, as in our tents we lay, With Syrian spikenard on our glistening hair?

 "With thee I shared Philippi's headlong flight, My shield behind me left, which was not well, When all that brave array was broke, and fell In the vile dust full many a towering wight. 

 "But me, poor trembler, swift Mercurius bore, Wrapped in a cloud, through all the hostile din, Whilst war's tumultuous eddies, closing in, Swept thee away into the strife once more. 

 "Then pay to Jove the feasts that are his fee, And stretch at ease these war-worn limbs of thine Beneath my laurel's shade; nor spare the wine Which I have treasured through long years for thee. 

 "Pour till it touch the shining goblet's rim, Care-drowning Massic; let rich ointments flow From amplest conchs! No measure we shall know! What! shall we wreaths of oozy parsley trim, "Or simple myrtle? Whom will Venus[1] send To rule our revel? Wild my draughts shall be As Thracian Bacchanals', for 'tis sweet to me To lose my wits, when I regain my friend. "

[1] Venus was the highest cast of the dice. The meaning here is, Who shall be the master of our feast?--that office falling to the member of the wine-party who threw sixes. 

When Horace penned the playful allusion here made to having left hisshield on the field of battle (_parmula non bene relicta_), hecould never have thought that his commentators--professed admirers, too--would extract from it an admission of personal cowardice. As ifany man, much more a Roman to Romans, would make such a confession!Horace could obviously afford to put in this way the fact of hishaving given up a desperate cause, for this very reason, that he haddone his duty on the field of Philippi, and that it was known he haddone it. Commentators will be so cruelly prosaic! The poet was quiteas serious in saying that Mercury carried him out of the _melée_in a cloud, like one of Homer's heroes, as that he had left his shielddiscreditably (_non bene_) on the battle-field. But it requires apoetic sympathy, which in classical editors is rare, to understandthat, as Lessing and others have urged, the very way he speaks of hisown retreat was by implication a compliment, not ungraceful, to hisfriend, who had continued the struggle against the triumvirate, andcome home at last, war-worn and weary, to find the more politiccomrade of his youth one of the celebrities of Rome, and on the bestof terms with the very men against whom they had once fought side byside. 

Not less beautiful is the following Ode to Septimius, another of thepoet's old companions in arms (Odes, II. 6). His speaking of himselfin it as "with war and travel worn" has puzzled the commentators, asit is plain from the rest of the poem that it must have been writtenlong after his campaigning days were past. But the fatigues of thosedays may have left their traces for many years; and the difficulty isat once got over if we suppose the poem to have been written undersome little depression from languid health due to this cause. Tarentum, where his friend lived, and whose praises are so warmlysung, was a favourite resort of the poet's. He used to ride there on hismule, very possibly to visit Septimius, before he had his own Sabinevilla; and all his love for that villa never chilled his admiration forTibur, with its "silvan shades, and orchards moist with wimpling rills, "--the "_Tiburni lucus, et uda mobilibus pomaria rivis_, "-and its milderclimate, so genial to his sun-loving temperament:--

 "Septimius, thou who wouldst, I know, With me to distant Gades go, And visit the Cantabrian fell, Whom all our triumphs cannot quell, And even the sands barbarian brave, Where ceaseless seethes the Moorish wave;

 "May Tibur, that delightful haunt, Reared by an Argive emigrant, The tranquil haven be, I pray, For my old age to wear away; Oh, may it be the final bourne To one with war and travel worn!

 "But should the cruel fates decree That this, my friend, shall never be, Then to Galaesus, river sweet To skin-clad flocks, will I retreat, And those rich meads, where sway of yore Laconian Phalanthus bore. 

 "In all the world no spot there is, That wears for me a smile like this, The honey of whose thymy fields May vie with what Hymettus yields, Where berries clustering every slope May with Venafrum's greenest cope. 

 "There Jove accords a lengthened spring, And winters wanting winter's sting, And sunny Aulon's[1] broad incline Such mettle puts into the vine, Its clusters need not envy those Which fiery Falernum grows. 

 "Thyself and me that spot invites, Those pleasant fields, those sunny heights; And there, to life's last moments true, Wilt thou with some fond tears bedew-- The last sad tribute love can lend-- The ashes of thy poet-friend. "

[1] Galaesus (Galaso), a river; Aulon, a hill near Tarentum. 

Septimius was himself a poet, or thought himself one, who, "Holding vulgar ponds and runnels cheap, At Pindar's fount drank valiantly and deep, "

as Horace says of him in an Epistle (I. 3) to Julius Florus; adding, with a sly touch of humour, which throws more than a doubt on thepoetic powers of their common friend, --

 "Thinks he of me? And does he still aspire To marry Theban strains to Latium's lyre, Thanks to the favouring muse? Or haply rage And mouth in bombast for the tragic stage?"

When this was written Septimius was in Armenia along with Florus, onthe staff of Tiberius Claudius Nero, the future emperor. For thisappointment he was probably indebted to Horace, who applied for it, athis request, in the following Epistle to Tiberius (I. 9), whichAddison ('Spectator, ' 493) cites as a fine specimen of what a letterof introduction should be. Horace was, on principle, wisely chary ofgiving such introductions. 

 "Look round and round the man you recommend, For yours will be the shame if he offend, " (C. )

is his maxim on this subject (Epistles, I. 18, 76); and he was sure tobe especially scrupulous in writing to Tiberius, who, even in hisyouth--and he was at this time about twenty-two--was so morose andunpleasant in his manners, to say nothing of his ample share of thehereditary pride of the Claudian family, that even Augustus felt underconstraint in his company:--

 "Septimius only understands, 'twould seem, How high I stand in, Claudius, your esteem: For when he begs and prays me, day by day, Before you his good qualities to lay, As not unfit the heart and home to share Of Nero, who selects his friends with care; When he supposes you to me extend The rights and place of a familiar friend, Far better than myself he sees and knows, How far with you my commendation goes. Pleas without number I protest I've used, In hope he'd hold me from the task excused, Yet feared the while it might be thought I feigned Too low the influence I perchance have gained, Dissembling it as nothing with my friends, To keep it for my own peculiar ends. So, to escape such dread reproach, I put My blushes by, and boldly urge my suit. If then you hold it as a grace, though small, To doff one's bashfulness at friendship's call, Enrol him in your suite, assured you'll find A man of heart in him, as well as mind. "

We may be very sure that, among the many pleas urged by Horace for notgiving Septimius the introduction he desired, was the folly of leavinghis delightful retreat at Tarentum to go once more abroad in search ofwealth or promotion. Let others "cross, to plunder provinces, themain, " surely this was no ambition for an embryo Pindar or half-developed Aeschylus. Horace had tried similar remonstrances before, and with just as little success, upon Iccius, another of his scholarlyfriends, who sold off his fine library and joined an expedition intoArabia Felix, expecting to find it an El Dorado. He playfully asksthis studious friend (Odes, I. 29), from whom he expected betterthings--"_pollicitus meliora_"--if it be true that he grudges theArabs their wealth, and is actually forging fetters for the hithertoinvincible Sabaean monarchs, and those terrible Medians? To which ofthe royal damsels does he intend to throw the handkerchief, havingfirst cut down her princely betrothed in single combat? Or what young"oiled and curled" Oriental prince is for the future to pour out hiswine for him? Iccius, like many another Raleigh, went out to gatherwool, and came back shorn. The expedition proved disastrous, and hewas lucky in being one of the few who survived it. Some yearsafterwards we meet with him again as the steward of Agrippa's greatestates in Sicily. He has resumed his studies, --

 "On themes sublime alone intent, -- What causes the wild ocean sway, The seasons what from June to May, If free the constellations roll, Or moved by some supreme control; What makes the moon obscure her light, What pours her splendour on the night. "

Absorbed in these and similar inquiries, and living happily on "herbsand frugal fare, " Iccius realises the noble promise of his youth; andHorace, in writing to him (Epist. , I. 12), encourages him in hisdisregard of wealth by some of those hints for contentment which thepoet never tires of reproducing:--

 "Let no care trouble you; for poor That man is not, who can insure Whate'er for life is needful found. Let your digestion be but sound, Your side unwrung by spasm or stitch, Your foot unconscious of a twitch; And could you be more truly blest, Though of the wealth of kings possessed?"

It must have been pleasant to Horace to find even one among hisfriends illustrating in his life this modest Socratic creed; for he isso constantly enforcing it, in every variety of phrase and metaphor, that while we must conclude that he regarded it as the one doctrinemost needful for his time, we must equally conclude that he found itutterly disregarded. All round him wealth, wealth, wealth, was theuniversal aim: wealth, to build fine houses in town, and villas atPraeneste or Baiae; wealth, to stock them with statues, old bronzes(mostly fabrications from the Wardour Streets of Athens or Rome), ivories, pictures, gold plate, pottery, tapestry, stuffs from thelooms of Tyre, and other _articles de luxe_; wealth, to givegorgeous dinners, and wash them down with the costliest wines; wealth, to provide splendid equipages, to forestall the front seats in thetheatre, as we do opera-boxes on the grand tier, and so get a fewyards nearer to the Emperor's chair, or gain a closer view of thefavourite actor or dancer of the day; wealth, to secure a wife with afortune and a pedigree; wealth, to attract gadfly friends, who willconsume your time, eat your dinners, drink your wines, and then abusethem, and who will with amiable candour regale their circle byquizzing your foibles, or slandering your taste, if they are even sokind as to spare your character. "A dowried wife, " he says (Epistles, I. 6), "Friends, beauty, birth, fair fame, These are the gifts of money, heavenly dame; Be but a moneyed man, persuasion tips Your tongue, and Venus settles on your lips. " (C. )

And to achieve this wealth, no sacrifice was to be spared--time, happiness, health, honour itself. "_Rem facias, rem! Si possisrecte, si non, quocunque modo rem:_"--

 "Get money, money still, And then let Virtue follow, if she will. "

Wealth sought in this spirit, and for such ends, of course brought nomore enjoyment to the contemporaries of Horace than we see it doing toour own. And not the least evil of the prevailing mania, then as now, was, that it robbed life of its simplicity, and of the homelyfriendliness on which so much of its pleasure depends. People livedfor show--to propitiate others, not to satisfy their own betterinstincts or their genuine convictions; and straining after the shadowof enjoyment, they let the reality slip from their grasp. They never"were, but always to be, blest. " It was the old story, which the worldis continually re-enacting, while the sage stands by, and marvels atits folly, and preaches what we call commonplaces, in a vain endeavourto modify or to prevent it. But the wisdom of life consists ofcommonplaces, which we should all be much the better for working intoour practice, instead of complacently sneering at them as platitudes. Horace abounds in commonplaces, and on no theme more than this. He hasno divine law of duty to appeal to, as we have--no assured hereafterto which he may point the minds of men; but he presses strongly hometheir folly, in so far as this world is concerned. To what good, heasks, all this turmoil and disquiet? No man truly possesses more thanhe is able thoroughly to enjoy. Grant that you roll in gold, or, byaccumulating land, become, in Hamlet's phrase, "spacious in thepossession of dirt. " What pleasure will you extract from these, whicha moderate estate will not yield in equal, if not greater, measure?You fret yourself to acquire your wealth--you fret yourself lest youshould lose it. It robs you of your health, your ease of mind, yourfreedom of thought and action. Riches will not bribe inexorable deathto spare you. At any hour that great leveller may sweep you away intodarkness and dust, and what will it then avail you, that you havewasted all your hours, and foregone all wholesome pleasure, in addingingot to ingot, or acre to acre, for your heirs to squander? Set abound, then, to your desires: think not of how much others have, butof how much which they have you can do perfectly well without. Be notthe slave of show or circumstance, "but in yourself possess your owndesire. " Do not lose the present in vain perplexities about thefuture. If fortune lours to-day, she may smile to-morrow; and when shelavishes her gifts upon you, cherish an humble heart, and so fortifyyourself against her caprice. Keep a rein upon all your passions--uponcovetousness, above all; for once that has you within its clutch, farewell for ever to the light heart and the sleep that comesunbidden, to the open eye that drinks in delight from the beauty andfreshness and infinite variety of nature, to the unclouded mind thatjudges justly and serenely of men and things. Enjoy wisely, for thenonly you enjoy thoroughly. Live each day as though it were your last. Mar not your life by a hopeless quarrel with destiny. It will be onlytoo brief at the best, and the day is at hand when its inequalitieswill be redressed, and king and peasant, pauper and millionaire, behuddled, poor shivering phantoms, in one undistinguishable crowd, across the melancholy Styx, to the judgment-hall of Minos. To thistheme many of Horace's finest Odes are strung. Of these, not the leastgraceful is that addressed to Dellius (II. 3):--

 "Let not the frowns of fate Disquiet thee, my friend, Nor, when she smiles on thee, do thou, elate With vaunting thoughts, ascend Beyond the limits of becoming mirth; For, Dellius, thou must die, become a clod of earth!

 "Whether thy days go down In gloom, and dull regrets, Or, shunning life's vain struggle for renown, Its fever and its frets, Stretch'd on the grass, with old Falernian wine, Thou giv'st the thoughtless hours a rapture all divine. 

 "Where the tall spreading pine And white-leaved poplar grow, And, mingling their broad boughs in leafy twine, A grateful shadow throw, Where down its broken bed the wimpling stream Writhes on its sinuous way with many a quivering gleam, "There wine, there perfumes bring, Bring garlands of the rose, Fair and too shortlived daughter of the spring, While youth's bright current flows Within thy veins, --ere yet hath come the hour When the dread Sisters Three shall clutch thee in their power. 

 "Thy woods, thy treasured pride, Thy mansion's pleasant seat, Thy lawns washed by the Tiber's yellow tide, Each favourite retreat, Thou must leave all--all, and thine heir shall run In riot through the wealth thy years of toil have won. 

 "It recks not whether thou Be opulent, and trace Thy birth from kings, or bear upon thy brow Stamp of a beggar's race; In rags or splendour, death at thee alike, That no compassion hath for aught of earth, will strike. 

 "One road, and to one bourne We all are goaded. Late Or soon will issue from the urn Of unrelenting Fate The lot, that in yon bark exiles us all To undiscovered shores, from which is no recall. "

In a still higher strain he sings (Odes, III. 1) the ultimate equalityof all human souls, and the vanity of encumbering life with theanxieties of ambition or wealth:--

 "Whate'er our rank may be, We all partake one common destiny! In fair expanse of soil, Teeming with rich returns of wine and oil, His neighbour one outvies; Another claims to rise To civic dignities, Because of ancestry and noble birth, Or fame, or proved pre-eminence of worth, Or troops of clients, clamorous in his cause; Still Fate doth grimly stand, And with impartial hand The lots of lofty and of lowly draws From that capacious urn Whence every name that lives is shaken in its turn. 

 "To him, above whose guilty head, Suspended by a thread, The naked sword is hung for evermore, Not feasts Sicilian shall With all their cates recall That zest the simplest fare could once inspire; Nor song of birds, nor music of the lyre Shall his lost sleep restore: But gentle sleep shuns not The rustic's lowly cot, Nor mossy bank o'ercanopied with trees, Nor Tempe's leafy vale stirred by the western breeze. 

 "The man who lives content with whatsoe'er Sufficeth for his needs, The storm-tossed ocean vexeth not with care, Nor the fierce tempest which Arcturus breeds, When in the sky he sets, Nor that which Hoedus, at his rise, begets: Nor will he grieve, although His vines be all laid low Beneath the driving hail, Nor though, by reason of the drenching rain, Or heat, that shrivels up his fields like fire, Or fierce extremities of winter's ire, Blight shall o'erwhelm his fruit-trees and his grain, And all his farm's delusive promise fail. 

 "The fish are conscious that a narrower bound Is drawn the seas around By masses huge hurled down into the deep. There, at the bidding of a lord, for whom Not all the land he owns is ample room, Do the contractor and his labourers heap Vast piles of stone, the ocean back to sweep. But let him climb in pride, That lord of halls unblest, Up to their topmost crest, Yet ever by his side Climb Terror and Unrest; Within the brazen galley's sides Care, ever wakeful, flits, And at his back, when forth in state he rides. Her withering shadow sits. 

 "If thus it fare with all, If neither marbles from the Phrygian mine, Nor star-bright robes of purple and of pall, Nor the Falernian vine, Nor costliest balsams, fetched from farthest Ind, Can soothe the restless mind, Why should I choose To rear on high, as modern spendthrifts use, A lofty hall, might be the home for kings, With portals vast, for Malice to abuse, Or Envy make her theme to point a tale; Or why for wealth, which new-born trouble brings, Exchange my Sabine vale?"

CHAPTER VIII. 

PREVAILING BELIEF IN ASTROLOGY. --HORACE'S VIEWS OF A HEREAFTER. --RELATIONS WITH MAECENAS. --BELIEF IN THE PERMANENCE OF HIS OWN FAME. 

"When all looks fair about, " says Sir Thomas Browne, "and thou seestnot a cloud so big as a hand to threaten thee, forget not the wheel ofthings; think of sudden, vicissitudes, but beat not thy brains toforeknow them. " It was characteristic of an age of luxury that itshould be one of superstition and mental disquietude, eager topenetrate the future, and credulous in its belief of those whopretended to unveil its secrets. In such an age astrology naturallyfound many dupes. Rome was infested with professors of that so-calledscience, who had flocked thither from the East, and were always ready, like other oracles, to supply responses acceptable to their votaries. In what contempt Horace held their prognostications the following Ode(I. 11) very clearly indicates. The women of Rome, according toJuvenal, were great believers in astrology, and carried manuals of iton their persons, which they consulted before they took an airing orbroke their fast. Possibly on this account Horace addressed the ode toa lady. But in such things, and not under the Roman Empire only, therehave always been, as La Fontaine says, "_bon nombre d'hommes quisont femmes_. " If Augustus, and his great general and statesmanAgrippa, had a Theogenes to forecast their fortunes, so the firstNapoleon had his Madame Lenormand. 

 "Ask not--such lore's forbidden-- What destined term may be Within the future hidden For us, Leuconöe. Both thou and I Must quickly die! Content thee, then, nor madly hope To wrest a false assurance from Chaldean horoscope. 

 "Far nobler, better were it, Whate'er may be in store, With soul serene to bear it, If winters many more Jove spare for thee, Or this shall be The last, that now with sullen roar Scatters the Tuscan surge in foam upon the rock-bound shore. 

 "Be wise, your spirit firing With cups of tempered wine, And hopes afar aspiring In compass brief confine, Use all life's powers; The envious hours Fly as we talk; then live to-day, Nor fondly to to-morrow trust more than you must or may. "

In the verses of Horace we are perpetually reminded that our life iscompassed round with darkness, but he will not suffer this darkness toovershadow his cheerfulness. On the contrary, the beautiful world, andthe delights it offers, are made to stand out, as it were, in brighterrelief against the gloom of Orcus. Thus, for example, this very gloomis made the background in the following Ode (I. 4) for the brilliantpictures which crowd on the poet's fancy with the first burst ofSpring. Here, he says, oh Sestius, all is fresh and joyous, luxuriantand lovely! Be happy, drink in "at every pore the spirit of theseason, " while the roses are fresh within your hair, and the wine-cupflashes ruby in your hand. Yonder lies Pluto's meagrely-appointedmansion, and filmy shadows of the dead are waiting for you there, toswell their joyless ranks. To that unlovely region you must go, alas!too soon; but the golden present is yours, so drain it of its sweets. 

 "As biting Winter flies, lo! Spring with sunny skies, And balmy airs; and barks long dry put out again from shore; Now the ox forsakes his byre, and the husbandman his fire, And daisy-dappled meadows bloom where winter frosts lay hoar. 

 "By Cytherea led, while the moon shines overhead, The Nymphs and Graces, hand-in-hand, with alternating feet Shake the ground, while swinking Vulcan strikes the sparkles fierceand red From the forges of the Cyclops, with reiterated beat. 

 "'Tis the time with myrtle green to bind our glistening locks, Or with flowers, wherein the loosened earth herself hath newlydressed, And to sacrifice to Faunus in some glade amidst the rocks A yearling lamb, or else a kid, if such delight him best. 

 "Death comes alike to all--to the monarch's lordly hall, Or the hovel of the beggar, and his summons none shall stay. Oh, Sestius, happy Sestius! use the moments as they pass; Far-reaching hopes are not for us, the creatures of a day. 

 "Thee soon shall night enshroud; and the Manes' phantom crowd, And the starveling house unbeautiful of Pluto shut thee in; And thou shalt not banish care by the ruddy wine-cup there, Nor woo the gentle Lycidas, whom all are mad to win. "

A modern would no more think of using such images as those of the lasttwo verses to stimulate the festivity of his friends than he would ofplacing, like the old Egyptians, a skull upon his dinner-table, or ofdecorating his ball-room with Holbein's "Dance of Death. " We rebukeour pride or keep our vanities in check by the thought of death, andour poets use it to remind us that

 "The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things. "

Horace does this too; but out of the sad certainty of mortality heseems to extract a keener zest for the too brief enjoyment of theflying hours. Why is this? Probably because by the pagan mind life onthis side the grave was regarded as a thing more precious, more noble, than the life beyond. That there was a life beyond was undoubtedly thegeneral belief. _"Sunt aliquid Manes; letum non omnia finit, Luridaque evictos effugit umbra rogos, _"--

 "The Manes are no dream; death closes not Our all of being, and the wan-visaged shade Escapes unscathed from the funereal fires, "

says Propertius (Eleg. IV. 7); and unless this were so, there would beno meaning whatever in the whole pagan idea of Hades--in the "_domusexilis Plutonia_;" in the Hermes driving the spirits of the deadacross the Styx; in the "_judicantem Aeacum, sedesque, discretaspiorum_"--the "Aeacus dispensing doom, and the Elysian Fieldsserene" (Odes, II. 13). But this after-life was a cold, sunless, unsubstantial thing, lower in quality and degree than the full, vigorous, passionate life of this world. The nobler spirits ofantiquity, it hardly need be said, had higher dreams of a future statethan this. For them, no more than for us, was it possible to rest inthe conviction that their brief and troubled career on earth was to bethe "be all and the end all" of existence, or that those whom they hadloved and lost in death became thenceforth as though they had neverbeen. It is idle to draw, as is often done, a different conclusionfrom such phrases as that after death we are a shadow and mere dust, "_pulvis et umbra sumus_!" or from Horace's bewildered cry (Odes, I. 24), when a friend of signal nobleness and purity is suddenlystruck down--"_Ergo Quinctilium perpetuus sopor urget_?"--"And isQuinctilius, then, weighed down by a sleep that knows no waking?" Wemight as reasonably argue that Shakespeare did not believe in a lifeafter death because he makes Prospero say--

 "We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. "

Horace and Shakespeare both believed in an immortality, but it was animmortality different in its kind. Horace, indeed, --who, as a rule, iswisely silent on a question which for him had no solution, howevermuch it may have engaged his speculations, --has gleams not unlikethose which irradiate our happier creed, as when he writes (Odes, III. 2) of "_Virtus, recludens immeritis mori coelum, negata tentat itervia_"--

 "Worth, which heaven's gates to those unbars Who never should have died, A pathway cleaves among the stars, To meaner souls denied. "

But they are only gleams, impassioned hopes, yearnings of theunsatisfied soul in its search for some solution of the great mysteryof life. To him, therefore, it was of more moment than it was to us, to make the most of the present, and to stimulate his relish for whatit has to give by contrasting it with a phantasmal future, in which nosingle faculty of enjoyment should be left. 

Take from life the time spent in hopes or fears or regrets, and howsmall the residue! For the same reason, therefore, that he prized lifeintensely, Horace seems to have resolved to keep these consumers ofits hours as much at bay as possible. He would not look too farforward even for a pleasure; for Hope, he knew, comes neverunaccompanied by her twin sister Fear. Like the Persian poet, OmarKhayyám, this is ever in his thoughts--

 "What boots it to repeat, How Time is slipping underneath our feet? Unborn To-morrow, and dead Yesterday, Why fret about them if To-day be sweet?". 

To-day--that alone is ours. Let us welcome and note what it brings, and, if good, enjoy it; if evil, endure. Let us, in any case, keep oureyes and senses open, and not lose their impressions in dreaming of anirretrievable past or of an impenetrable future. "Write it on yourheart, " says Emerson ('Society and Solitude'), "that every day is thebest day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until heknows that every day is Doomsday.... Ah, poor dupe! will you neverlearn that as soon as the irrecoverable years have woven their blueglories between To-day and us, these passing hours shall glitter, anddraw us, as the wildest romance and the homes of beauty and poetry?"Horace would have hailed a brother in the philosopher of New England. 

Even in inviting Maecenas to his Sabine farm (Odes, III. 29), he doesnot think it out of place to remind the minister of state, worn withthe cares of government, and looking restlessly ahead to anticipateits difficulties, that it may, after all, be wiser not to look so farahead, or to trouble himself about contingencies which may neverarise. We must not think that Horace undervalued that essentialquality of true statesmanship, the "_animus rerum prudens_"(Odes, IV. 9), the forecasting spirit that "looks into the seeds ofTime, " and reads the issues of events while they are still far off. Hesaw and prized the splendid fruits of the exercise of this very powerin the growing tranquillity and strength of the Roman empire. But thewisest may over-study a subject. Maecenas may have been working toohard, and losing under the pressure something of his usual calmness;and Horace, while urging him to escape from town for a few days, mayhave had it in view to insinuate the suggestion, that Jove smiles, notat the common mortal merely, but even at the sagacious statesman, whois over-anxious about the future--"_ultra fas trepidat_"--and toremind him that, after all, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we may. "

Dryden's splendid paraphrase of this Ode is one of the glories of ourliterature, but it is a paraphrase, and a version closer to theoriginal may be more appropriate here:--

 "Scion of Tuscan kings, in store I've laid a cask of mellow wine, That never has been broached before. I've roses, too, for wreaths to twine, And Nubian nut, that for thy hair An oil shall yield of fragrance rare. 

 * * * * *

 "The plenty quit, that only palls, And, turning from the cloud-capped pile That towers above thy palace halls, Forget to worship for a while The privileges Rome enjoys, Her smoke, her splendour, and her noise. 

 "It is the rich who relish best To dwell at times from state aloof; And simple suppers, neatly dressed, Beneath a poor man's humble roof, With neither pall nor purple there, Have smoothed ere now the brow of care. 

 * * * * *

 "Now with his spent and languid flocks The wearied shepherd seeks the shade, The river cool, the shaggy rocks, That overhang the tangled glade, And by the stream no breeze's gush Disturbs the universal hush. 

 "Thou dost devise with sleepless zeal What course may best the state beseem, And, fearful for the City's weal, Weigh'st anxiously each hostile scheme That may be hatching far away In Scythia, India, or Cathay. 

 "Most wisely Jove in thickest night The issues of the future veils, And laughs at the self-torturing wight Who with imagined terrors quails. The present only is thine own, Then use it well, ere it has flown. 

 "All else which may by time be bred Is like a river of the plain, Now gliding gently o'er its bed Along to the Etruscan main, Now whirling onwards, fierce and fast, Uprooted trees, and boulders vast, "And flocks, and houses, all in drear Confusion tossed from shore to shore, While mountains far, and forests near Reverberate the rising roar, When lashing rains among the hills To fury wake the quiet rills. 

 "Lord of himself that man will be, And happy in his life alway, Who still at eve can say with free Contented soul, 'I've lived to-day! Let Jove to-morrow, if he will, With blackest clouds the welkin fill, "'Or flood it all with sunlight pure, Yet from the past he cannot take Its influence, for that is sure, Nor can he mar or bootless make Whate'er of rapture and delight The hours have borne us in their flight. '"

The poet here passes, by one of those sudden transitions for which heis remarkable, into the topic of the fickleness of fortune, whichseems to have no immediate connection with what has gone before, --butonly seems, for this very fickleness is but a fresh reason for makingourselves, by self-possession and a just estimate of what is essentialto happiness, independent of the accidents of time or chance. 

 "Fortune, who with malicious glee Her merciless vocation plies, Benignly smiling now on me, Now on another, bids him rise, And in mere wantonness of whim Her favours shifts from me to him. 

 "I laud her whilst by me she holds, But if she spread her pinions swift, I wrap me in my virtue's folds, And, yielding back her every gift, Take refuge in the life so free Of bare but honest poverty. 

 "You will not find me, when the mast Groans 'neath the stress of southern gales, To wretched prayers rush off, nor cast Vows to the great gods, lest my bales From Tyre or Cyprus sink, to be Fresh booty for the hungry sea. 

 "When others then in wild despair To save their cumbrous wealth essay, I to the vessel's skiff repair, And, whilst the Twin Stars light my way, Safely the breeze my little craft Shall o'er the Aegean billows waft. "

Maecenas was of a melancholy temperament, and liable to greatdepression of spirits. Not only was his health at no time robust, buthe was constitutionally prone to fever, which more than once provednearly fatal to him. On his first appearance in the theatre after oneof these dangerous attacks, he was received with vehement cheers, andHorace alludes twice to this incident in his Odes, as if he knew thatit had given especial pleasure to his friend. To mark the event thepoet laid up in his cellar a jar of Sabine wine, and some yearsafterwards he invites Maecenas to come and partake of it in thischarming lyric (Odes, I. 20):--

 "Our common Sabine wine shall be The only drink I'll give to thee, In modest goblets, too; 'Twas stored in crock of Grecian delf, Dear knight Maecenas, by myself, That very day when through The theatre thy plaudits rang, And sportive echo caught the clang, And answered from the banks Of thine own dear paternal stream, Whilst Vatican renewed the theme Of homage and of thanks! Old Caecuban, the very best, And juice in vats Calenian pressed, You drink at home, I know: My cups no choice Falernian fills, Nor unto them do Formiae's hills Impart a tempered glow. "

About the same time that Maecenas recovered from this fever, Horacemade a narrow escape from being killed by the fall of a tree, and, what to him was a great aggravation of the disaster, upon his ownbeloved farm (Odes, II. 13). He links the two events together as amarked coincidence in the following Ode (II. 17). His friend hadobviously been a prey to one of his fits of low spirits, and vexingthe kindly soul of the poet by gloomy anticipations of an early death. Suffering, as Maecenas did, from those terrible attacks ofsleeplessness to which he was subject, and which he triedineffectually to soothe by the plash of falling water and the sound ofdistant music, [Footnote: Had Horace this in his mind when he wrote_"Non avium citharoeque cantus somnum reducent_?"--(Odes, III. 1. ) "Nor song of birds, nor music of the lyre / Shall his lost sleeprestore. "] such misgivings were only too natural. The case was tooserious this time for Horace to think of rallying his friend into abrighter humour. He may have even seen good cause to share his fears;for his heart is obviously moved to its very depths, and his sympathyand affection well out in words, the pathos of which is still as freshas the day they first came with comfort to the saddened spirits ofMaecenas himself. 

 "Why wilt thou kill me with thy boding fears? Why, oh Maecenas, why? Before thee lies a train of happy years: Yes, nor the gods nor I Could brook that thou shouldst first be laid in dust, Who art my stay, my glory, and my trust!

 "Ah, if untimely Fate should snatch thee hence, Thee, of my soul a part, Why should I linger on, with deadened sense, And ever-aching heart, A worthless fragment of a fallen shrine? No, no, one day shall see thy death and mine!

 "Think not that I have sworn a bootless oath; Yes, we shall go, shall go, Hand link'd in hand, whene'er thou leadest, both The last sad road below! Me neither the Chimaera's fiery breath, Nor Gyges, even could Gyges rise from death, "With all his hundred hands from thee shall sever; For in such sort it hath Pleased the dread Fates, and Justice potent ever, To interweave our path. [1] Beneath whatever aspect thou wert born, Libra, or Scorpion fierce, or Capricorn, "The blustering tyrant of the western deep, This well I know, my friend, Our stars in wondrous wise one orbit keep, And in one radiance blend. From thee were Saturn's baleful rays afar Averted by great Jove's refulgent star, "And His hand stayed Fate's downward-swooping wing, When thrice with glad acclaim The teeming theatre was heard to ring, And thine the honoured name: So had the falling timber laid me low, But Pan in mercy warded off the blow, "Pan who keeps watch o'er easy souls like mine. Remember, then, to rear In gratitude to Jove a votive shrine, And slaughter many a steer, Whilst I, as fits, an humbler tribute pay, And a meek lamb upon his altar lay. "

[1] So Cowley, in his poem on the death of Mr William Harvey:-- "He was my friend, the truest friend on earth; A strong and mighty influence joined our birth. "

What the poet, in this burst of loving sympathy, said would happen, did happen almost as he foretold it. Maecenas "first deceased;" andHorace, like the wife in the quaint, tender, old epitaph, "For a little tried To live without him, liked it not, and died. "

But this was not till many years after this Ode was written, whichmust have been about the year B. C. 36, when Horace was thirty-nine. Maecenas lived for seventeen years afterwards, and often and often, wemay believe, turned to read the Ode, and be refreshed by it, when hispulse was low, and his heart sick and weary. 

Horace included it in the first series of the Odes, containing BooksI. And II. , which he gave to the world (B. C. 24). The first of theseOdes, like the first of the Satires, is addressed to Maecenas. Theyhad for the most part been written, and were, no doubt, separately incirculation several years before. That they should have met withsuccess was certain; for the accomplished men who led society in Romemust have felt their beauty even more keenly than the scholars of amore recent time. These lyrics brought the music of Greece, which wastheir ideal, into their native verse; and a feeling of national pridemust have helped to augment their admiration. Horace had tuned his earupon the lyres of Sappho and Alcaeus. He had even in his youth essayedto imitate them in their own tongue, --a mistake as great as for Goetheor Heine to have tried to put their lyrical inspiration into thelanguage of Herrick or of Burns. But Horace was preserved fromperseverance in this mistake by his natural good sense, or, as he putsit himself, with a fair poetic licence (Satires, I. 10), by Rome'sgreat founder Quirinus warning him in a dream, that

 "To think of adding to the mighty throng Of the great paragons of Grecian song, Were no less mad an act than his who should Into a forest carry logs of wood. "

These exercises may not, however, have been without their value inenabling him to transfuse the melodic rhythm of the Greeks into hisnative verse. And as he was the first to do this successfully, if weexcept Catullus in some slight but exquisite poems, so he was thelast. "Of lyrists, " says Quintilian, "Horace is alone, one might say, worthy to be read. For he has bursts of inspiration, and is full ofplayful delicacy and grace; and in the variety of his images, as wellas in expression, shows a most happy daring. " Time has confirmed theverdict; and it has recently found eloquent expression in the words ofone of our greatest scholars:--

"Horace's style, " says Mr H. A. J. Munro, in the introduction to hisedition of the poet, "is throughout his own, borrowed from none whopreceded him, successfully imitated by none who came after him. TheVirgilian heroic was appropriated by subsequent generations of poets, and adapted to their purposes with signal success. The hendecasyllableand scazon of Catullus became part and parcel of the poetic heritageof Rome, and Martial employs them only less happily than theirmatchless creator. But the moulds in which Horace cast his lyrical andhis satirical thoughts were broken at his death. The style neither ofPersius nor of Juvenal has the faintest resemblance to that of theircommon master. Statius, whose hendecasyllables are passable enough, has given us one Alcaic and one Sapphic ode, which recall the bald andconstrained efforts of a modern schoolboy. I am sure he could not havewritten any two consecutive stanzas of Horace; and if he could not, who could?"

Before he published the first two books of his Odes, Horace had fairlyfelt his wings, and knew they could carry him gracefully and well. Heno longer hesitates, as he had done while a writer of Satires only (p. 55), to claim the title of poet; but at the same time he throwshimself, in his introductory Ode, with a graceful deference, upon thejudgment of Maecenas. Let that only seal his lyrics with approval, andhe will feel assured of his title to rank with the great sons ofsong:--

 "Do thou but rank me 'mong The sacred bards of lyric song, I'll soar beyond the lists of time, And strike the stars with head sublime. "

In the last Ode, also addressed to Maecenas, of the Second Book, thepoet gives way to a burst of joyous anticipation of future fame, figuring himself as a swan soaring majestically across all the thenknown regions of the world. When he puts forth the Third Book severalyears afterwards, he closes it with a similar paean of triumph, which, unlike most prophecies of the kind, has been completely fulfilled. Inboth he alludes to the lowliness of his birth, speaking of himself inthe former as a child of poor parents--"_pauperum sanguisparentum_;" in the latter as having risen to eminence from a meanestate-"_ex humili potens_. " These touches of egotism, thesallies of some brighter hour, are not merely venial; they aredelightful in a man so habitually modest. 

 "I've reared a monument, my own, More durable than brass; Yea, kingly pyramids of stone In height it doth surpass. 

 "Rain shall not sap, nor driving blast Disturb its settled base, Nor countless ages rolling past Its symmetry deface. 

 "I shall not wholly die. Some part, Nor that a little, shall Escape the dark Destroyer's dart, And his grim festival. 

 "For long as with his Vestals mute Rome's Pontifex shall climb The Capitol, my fame shall shoot Fresh buds through future time. 

 "Where brawls loud Aufidus, and came Parch'd Daunus erst, a horde Of rustic boors to sway, my name Shall be a household word;

 "As one who rose from mean estate, The first with poet fire Aeolic song to modulate To the Italian lyre. 

 "Then grant, Melpomene, thy son Thy guerdon proud to wear, And Delphic laurels, duly won. Bind thou upon my hair!"

CHAPTER IX. 

HORACE'S RELATIONS WITH AUGUSTUS. --HIS LOVE OF INDEPENDENCE. 

No intimate friend of Maecenas was likely to be long a stranger toAugustus; and it is most improbable that Augustus, who kept up hislove of good literature amid all the distractions of conquest andempire, should not have early sought the acquaintance of a man of suchconspicuous ability as Horace. But when they first became known toeach other is uncertain. In more than one of the Epodes Horace speaksof him, but not in terms to imply personal acquaintance. Some yearsfurther on it is different. When Trebatius (Satires, II. 1) is urgingthe poet, if write he must, to renounce satire, and to sing ofCaesar's triumphs, from which he would reap gain as well as glory, Horace replies, --

 "Most worthy sir, that's just the thing I'd like especially to sing; But at the task my spirits faint, For 'tis not every one can paint Battalions, with their bristling wall Of pikes, and make you see the Gaul, With, shivered spear, in death-throe bleed, Or Parthian stricken from his steed. "

Then why not sing, rejoins Trebatius, his justice and his fortitude, "Like sage Lucilius, in his lays To Scipio Africanus' praise?"

The reply is that of a man who had obviously been admitted to personalcontact with the Caesar, and, with instinctive good taste, recoiledfrom doing what he knew would be unacceptable to him, unless calledfor by some very special occasion:--

 "When time and circumstance suggest, I shall not fail to do my best; But never words of mine shall touch Great Caesar's ear, but only such As are to the occasion due, And spring from my conviction, too; For stroke him with an awkward hand, And he kicks out--you understand?"

an allusion, no doubt, to the impatience entertained by Augustus, towhich Suetonius alludes, of the indiscreet panegyrics of poetasters bywhich he was persecuted. The gossips of Rome clearly believed(Satires, II. 6) that the poet was intimate with Caesar; for he is "soclose to the gods"--that is, on such a footing with Augustus and hischief advisers--that they assume, as a matter of course, he must haveearly tidings of all the most recent political news at first hand. However this may be, by the time the Odes were published Horace hadovercome any previous scruples, and sang in no measured terms thepraises of him, the back-stroke of whose rebuke he had professedhimself so fearful of provoking. 

All Horace's prepossessions must have been against one of the leadersbefore whose opposition Brutus, the ideal hero of his youthfulenthusiasm, had succumbed. Neither were the sanguinary proscriptionsand ruthless spoliations by which the triumvirate asserted its power, and from a large share of the guilt of which Augustus could not shakehimself free, calculated to conciliate his regards. He had much toforget and to forgive before he could look without aversion upon theblood-stained avenger of the great Caesar. But in times like those inwhich Horace's lot was cast, we do not judge of men or things as we dowhen social order is unbroken, when political crime is never condoned, and the usual standards of moral judgment are rigidly enforced. Horaceprobably soon came to see, what is now very apparent, that when Brutusand his friends struck down Caesar, they dealt a deathblow to what, but for this event, might have proved to be a well-ordered government. Liberty was dead long before Caesar aimed at supremacy. It was deadwhen individuals like Sulla and Marius had become stronger than thelaws; and the death of Caesar was, therefore, but the prelude to freshdisasters, and to the ultimate investiture with absolute power ofwhoever, among the competitors for it, should come triumphantly out ofwhat was sure to be a protracted and a sanguinary struggle. In whatstate did Horace find Italy after his return from Philippi? Drenchedin the blood of its citizens, desolated by pillage, harassed by dailyfears of internecine conflict at home and of invasion from abroad, itssovereignty a stake played for by political gamblers. In such a stateof things it was no longer the question, how the old Romanconstitution was to be restored, but how the country itself was to besaved from ruin. Prestige was with the nephew of the Caesar whosememory the Roman populace had almost from his death worshipped asdivine; and whose conspicuous ability and address, as well as those ofhis friends, naturally attracted to his side the ablest survivors ofthe party of Brutus. The very course of events pointed to him as thefuture chief of the state. Lepidus, by the sheer weakness andindecision of his character, soon went to the wall; and the power ofAntony was weakened by his continued absence from Rome, and ultimatelydestroyed by the malign influence exerted upon his character by thefascinations of the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra. The disastrous failureof his Parthian expedition (B. C. 36), and the tidings that reachedRome from time to time of the mad extravagance of his private life, ofhis abandonment of the character of a Roman citizen, and hisassumption of the barbaric pomp and habits of an oriental despot, mademen look to his great rival as the future head of the state, especially as they saw that rival devoting all his powers to the taskof reconciling divisions and restoring peace to a country exhausted bya long series of civil broils, of giving security to life and propertyat home, and making Rome once more a name of awe throughout the world. Was it, then, otherwise than natural that Horace, in common with manyof his friends, should have been not only content to forget the past, with its bloody and painful records, but should even have attachedhimself cordially to the party of Augustus? Whatever the private aimsof the Caesar may have been, his public life showed that he had thewelfare of his country strongly at heart, and the current of eventshad made it clear that he at least was alone able to end the strife offaction by assuming the virtual supremacy of the state. 

Pollio, Messalla, Varus, and others of the Brutus party, have not beendenounced as renegades because they arrived at a similar conclusion, and lent the whole influence of their abilities and their names to thecause of Augustus. Horace has not been so fortunate; and because hehas expressed, --what was no doubt the prevailing feeling of hiscountrymen, --gratitude to Augustus for quelling civil strife, forbringing glory to the empire, and giving peace, security, andhappiness to his country by the power of his arms and the wisdom ofhis administration, the poet has been called a traitor to the noblerprinciples of his youth--an obsequious flatterer of a man whom heought to have denounced to posterity as a tyrant. _Adroitesclave_ is the epithet applied to him in this respect by Voltaire, who idolises him as a moralist and poet. But it carries little weightin the mouth of the cynic who could fawn with more than courtierlycomplaisance on a Frederick or a Catherine, and weave gracefulflatteries for the Pompadour, and who "dearly loved a lord" in hispractice, however he may have sneered at aristocracy in his writings. But if we put ourselves as far as we can into the poet's place, weshall come to a much more lenient conclusion. He could no doubtappreciate thoroughly the advantages of a free republic or of a purelyconstitutional government, and would, of course, have preferred eitherof these for his country. But while theory pointed in that direction, facts were all pulling the opposite way. The materials for theestablishment of such a state of things did not exist in a strongmiddle class or an equal balance of parties. The choice lay betweenthe anarchy of a continued strife of selfish factions, and theconcentration of power in the hands of some individual who should becapable of enforcing law at home and commanding respect abroad. So atleast Horace obviously thought; and surely it is reasonable to supposethat the man, whose integrity and judgment in all other matters areindisputable, was more likely than the acutest critic or historian ofmodern times can possibly be to form a just estimate of what was thepossible best for his country, under the actual circumstances of thetime. 

Had Horace at once become the panegyrist of the Caesar, the sincerityof his convictions might have, been open to question. But thirteenyears at least had elapsed between the battle of Philippi and thecomposition of the Second Ode of the First Book, which is the firstdirect acknowledgment by Horace of Augustus as the chief of the state. This Ode is directly inspired by gratitude for the cessation of civilstrife, and the skilful administration which had brought things to thepoint when the whole fighting force of the kingdom, which had so longbeen wasted in that strife, could be directed to spreading the gloryof the Roman name, and securing its supremacy throughout its conqueredprovinces. The allusions to Augustus in this and others of the earlierOdes are somewhat cold and formal in their tone. There is a visibleincrease in glow and energy in those of a later date, when, as yearswent on, the Caesar established fresh claims on the gratitude of Romeby his firm, sagacious, and moderate policy, by the general prosperitywhich grew up under his administration, by the success of his arms, bythe great public works which enhanced the splendour and convenience ofthe capital, by the restoration of the laws, and by his zealousendeavour to stem the tide of immorality which had set in during theprotracted disquietudes of the civil wars. It is true that during thistime Augustus was also establishing the system of Imperialism, whichcontained in itself the germs of tyranny, with all its brutal excesseson the one hand, and its debasing influence upon the subject nation onthe other. But we who have seen into what it developed must rememberthat these baneful fruits of the system were of lengthened growth; andHorace, who saw no farther into the future than the practicalpoliticians of his time, may be forgiven if he dwelt only upon theimmediate blessings which the government of Augustus effected, and thepeace and security which came with a tenfold welcome after the longagonies of the civil wars. 

The glow and sincerity of feeling of which we have spoken areconspicuous in the following Ode (IV. 2), addressed to Iulus Antonius, the son of the triumvir, of whose powers as a poet nothing is knownbeyond the implied recognition of them contained in this Ode. TheSicambri, with two other German tribes, had crossed the Rhine, laidwaste part of the Roman territory in Gaul, and inflicted so serious ablow on Lollius, the Roman legate, that Augustus himself repaired toGaul to retrieve the defeat and resettle the province. This heaccomplished triumphantly (B. C. 17); and we may assume that the Odewas written while the tidings of his success were still fresh, and theRomans, who had been greatly agitated by the defeat of Lollius, werelooking eagerly forward to his return. Apart from, its other merits, the Ode is interesting from the estimate Horace makes in it of his ownpowers, and his avowal of the labour which his verses cost him. 

 "Iulus, he who'd rival Pindar's fame, On waxen wings doth sweep The Empyréan steep, To fall like Icarus, and with his name Endue the glassy deep. 

 "Like to a mountain stream, that roars From bank to bank along, When Autumn rains are strong, So deep-mouthed Pindar lifts his voice, and pours His fierce tumultuous song. 

 "Worthy Apollo's laurel wreath, Whether he strike the lyre To love and young desire, While bold and lawless numbers grow beneath His mastering touch of fire;

 "Or sings of gods, and monarchs sprung Of gods, that overthrew The Centaurs, hideous crew, And, fearless of the monster's fiery tongue, The dread Chimaera slew;

 "Or those the Eléan palm doth lift To heaven, for wingèd steed, Or sturdy arm decreed, Giving, than hundred statues nobler gift, The poet's deathless meed;

 "Or mourns the youth snatched from his bride, Extols his manhood clear, And to the starry sphere Exalts his golden virtues, scattering wide The gloom of Orcus drear. 

 "When the Dircéan swan doth climb Into the azure sky, There poised in ether high, He courts each gale, and floats on wing sublime, Soaring with steadfast eye. 

 "I, like the tiny bee, that sips The fragrant thyme, and strays Humming through leafy ways, By Tibur's sedgy banks, with trembling lips Fashion my toilsome lays. 

 "But thou, when up the sacred steep Caesar, with garlands crowned, Leads the Sicambrians bound, With bolder hand the echoing strings shalt sweep, And bolder measures sound. 

 "Caesar, than whom a nobler son The Fates and Heaven's kind powers Ne'er gave this earth of ours, Nor e'er will give though backward time should run To its first golden hours. 

 "Thou too shalt sing the joyful days, The city's festive throng, When Caesar, absent long, At length returns, --the Forum's silent ways, Serene from strife and wrong. 

 "Then, though in statelier power it lack, My voice shall swell the lay, And sing, 'Oh, glorious day, Oh, day thrice blest, that gives great Caesar back To Rome, from hostile fray!'

 "'Io Triumphe!' thrice the cry; 'Io Triumphe!' loud Shall shout the echoing crowd The city through, and to the gods on high Raise incense like a cloud. 

"Ten bulls shall pay thy sacrifice, With whom ten kine shall bleed: I to the fane will lead A yearling of the herd, of modest size, From the luxuriant mead, "Horned like the moon, when her pale light Which three brief days have fed, She trimmeth, and dispread On his broad brows a spot of snowy white, All else a tawny red. "

Augustus did not return from Gaul, as was expected when this Ode waswritten, but remained there for about two years. That this protractedabsence caused no little disquietude in Rome is apparent from thefollowing Ode (IV. 5):--

 "From gods benign descended, thou Best guardian of the fates of Rome, Too long already from thy home Hast thou, dear chief, been absent now;

 "Oh, then return, the pledge redeem, Thou gav'st the Senate, and once more Its light to all the land restore; For when thy face, like spring-tide's gleam, "Its brightness on the people sheds, Then glides the day more sweetly by, A brighter blue pervades the sky, The sun a richer radiance spreads!

 "As on her boy the mother calls, Her boy, whom envious tempests keep Beyond the vexed Carpathian deep, From his dear home, till winter falls, "And still with vow and prayer she cries, Still gazes on the winding shore, So yearns the country evermore For Caesar, with fond, wistful eyes. 

 "For safe the herds range field and fen, Full-headed stand the shocks of grain, Our sailors sweep the peaceful main, And man can trust his fellow-men. 

 "No more adulterers stain our beds, Laws, morals, both that taint efface, The husband in the child we trace, And close on crime sure vengeance treads. 

 "The Parthian, under Caesar's reign, Or icy Scythian, who can dread, Or all the tribes barbarian bred By Germany, or ruthless Spain?

 "Now each man, basking on his slopes, Weds to his widowed trees the vine, Then, as he gaily quaffs his wine, Salutes thee god of all his hopes;

 "And prayers to thee devoutly sends, With deep libations; and, as Greece Ranks Castor and great Hercules, Thy godship with his Lares blends. 

 "Oh, may'st thou on Hesperia shine, Her chief, her joy, for many a day! Thus, dry-lipped, thus at morn we pray, Thus pray at eve, when flushed with wine. "

"It was perhaps the policy of Augustus, " says Macleane, "to make hisabsence felt; and we may believe that the language of Horace, whichbears much more the impress of real feeling than of flattery, represented the sentiments of great numbers at Rome, who felt the wantof that presiding genius which had brought the city through its longtroubles, and given it comparative peace. There could not be a morecomprehensive picture of security and rest obtained through theinfluence of one mind than is represented in this Ode, if we exceptthat with which no merely mortal language can compare (Isaiah, xi. Andlxv. ; Micah, iv. )"

We must not assume, from the reference in this and other Odes to thedivine origin of Augustus, that this was seriously Relieved in byHorace, any more than it was by Augustus himself. Popular credulityascribed divine honours to great men; and this was the natural growthof a religious system in which a variety of gods and demigods playedso large a part. Julius Caesar claimed-no doubt, for the purpose ofimpressing the Roman populace-a direct descent from _Alma VenusGenitrix_, as Antony did from Hercules. Altars and temples werededicated to great statesmen and generals; and the Romans, among theother things which they borrowed from the East, borrowed also thepractice of conferring the honours of apotheosis upon their rulers, --the visible agents, in their estimation, of the great invisible powerthat governed the world. To speak of their divine descent andattributes became part of the common forms of the poetical vocabulary, not inappropriate to the exalted pitch of lyrical enthusiasm. Horaceonly falls into the prevailing strain, and is not compromising himselfby servile flattery, as some have thought, when he speaks in this Odeof Augustus as "from gods benign descended, " and in others as "theheaven-sent son of Maia" (I. 2), or as reclining among the gods andquaffing nectar "with lip of deathless bloom" (III. 3). In lyricalpoetry all this was quite in place. But when the poet contracts hiswings, and drops from its empyrean to the level of the earth, hespeaks to Augustus and of him simply as he thought (Epistles, II. 1)--as a man on whose shoulders the weight of empire rested, who protectedthe commonwealth by the vigour of his armies, and strove to grace itby "sweeter manners, purer laws. " He adds, it is true, --

 "You while in life are honoured as divine, And vows and oaths are taken at your shrine; So Rome pays honour to her man of men, Ne'er seen on earth before, ne'er to be seen again "--(C. )

but this is no more than a statement of a fact. Altars were erected toAugustus, much against his will, and at these men made their prayersor plighted their oaths every day. There is not a word to imply eitherthat Augustus took these divine honours, or that Horace joined inascribing them, seriously. 

It is of some importance to the argument in favour of Horace'ssincerity and independence, that he had no selfish end to serve bystanding well with Augustus. We have seen that he was more thancontent with the moderate fortune secured to him by Maecenas. Wealthhad no charms for him. His ambition was to make his mark as a poet. His happiness lay in being his own master. There is no trace of hishaving at any period been swayed by other views. What then had he togain by courting the favour of the head of the state? But the argumentgoes further. When Augustus found the pressure of his privatecorrespondence too great, as his public duties increased, and hishealth, never robust, began to fail, he offered Horace the post of hisprivate secretary. The poet declined on the ground of health. Hecontrived to do so in such a way as to give no umbrage by the refusal;nay, the letters which are quoted in the life of Horace ascribed toSuetonius show that Augustus begged the poet to treat him on the samefooting as if he had accepted the office, and actually become a memberof his household. "Our friend Septimius, " he says in another letter, "will tell you how much you are in my thoughts; for something led tomy speaking of you before him. Neither, if you were too proud toaccept my friendship, do I mean to deal with you in the same spirit. "There could have been little of the courtier in the man who was thusaddressed. Horace apparently felt that Augustus and himself werelikely to be better friends at a distance. He had seen enough of courtlife to know how perilous it is to that independence which was hisdearest possession. "_Dulcis inexpertis cultura potentis amici, -Expertus metuit_, " is his ultimate conviction on this head(Epistles, I. 18)--

 "Till time has made us wise, 'tis sweet to wait Upon the smiles and favour of the great; But he that once has ventured that career Shrinks from its perils with instinctive fear. "

In another place (Epistles, I. 10) he says, "_Fuge magna; licet subpaupere tecto Reges et regum vita praecurrere amicos_"--

 "Keep clear of courts; a homely life transcends The vaunted bliss of monarchs and their friends. _" (C. )

But apart from such considerations, life would have lost its charm forHorace, had he put himself within the trammels of official service. Atno time would these have been tolerable to him; but as he advancedinto middle age, the freedom of entire independence, the refreshingsolitudes of the country, leisure for study and reflection, becamemore and more precious to him. The excitements and gaieties and socialenjoyments of Rome were all very well, but a little of them went agreat way. They taxed his delicate health, and they interfered withthe graver studies, to which he became daily more inclined as theyears went by. Not all his regard for Maecenas himself, deep as itwas, could induce him to stay in town to enliven the leisure hours ofthe statesman by his companionship at the expense of those calmseasons of communion with nature and the books of the great men ofold, in which he could indulge his irresistible craving for somesolution of the great problems of life and philosophy. Men likeMaecenas, whose power and wealth are practically unbounded, are apt tobecome importunate even in their friendships, and to think thateverything should give way to the gratification of their wishes. Something of this spirit had obviously been shown towards Horace. Maecenas may have expressed himself in a tone of complaint, either tothe poet himself, or in some way that had reached his ears, about hisprolonged absence in the country, which implied that he considered hisbounties had given him a claim upon the time of Horace which was notsufficiently considered. This could only have been a burst ofmomentary impatience, for the nature of Maecenas was too generous toadmit of any other supposition. But Horace felt it; and with theutmost delicacy of tact, but with a decision that left no room formistake, he lost no time in letting Maecenas know, that rather thanbrook control upon his movements, however slight, he will cheerfullyforego the gifts of his friend, dear as they are, and grateful forthem as he must always be. To this we owe the following Epistle (I. 7). That Maecenas loved his friend all the better for it--he couldscarcely respect him more than he seems to have done from the first--we may be very sure. 

 Only five days, I said, I should be gone; Yet August's past, and still I linger on. 'Tis true I've broke my promise. But if you Would have me well, as I am sure you do, Grant me the same indulgence, which, were I Laid up with illness, you would not deny, Although I claim it only for the fear Of being ill, this deadly time of year, When autumn's clammy heat and early fruits Deck undertakers out, and inky mutes; When young mammas, and fathers to a man, With terrors for their sons and heirs are wan; When stifling anteroom, or court, distils Fevers wholesale, and breaks the seals of wills. Should winter swathe the Alban fields in snow, Down to the sea your poet means to go, To nurse his ailments, and, in cosy nooks Close huddled up, to loiter o'er his books. But once let zephyrs blow, sweet friend, and then, If then you'll have him, he will quit his den, With the first swallow hailing you again. When you bestowed on me what made me rich, Not in the spirit was it done, in which Your bluff Calabrian on a guest will thrust His pears: "Come, eat, man, eat--you can, you must!" "Indeed, indeed, my friend, I've had enough. " "Then take some home!" "You're too obliging. " "Stuff! If you have pockets full of them, I guess, Your little lads will like you none the less. " "I really can't--thanks all the same!" "You won't? Why then the pigs shall have them, if you don't. " 'Tis fools and prodigals, whose gifts consist Of what they spurn, or what is never missed: Such tilth will never yield, and never could, A harvest save of coarse ingratitude. A wise good man is evermore alert, When he encounters it, to own desert; Nor is he one, on whom you'd try to pass For sterling currency mere lackered brass. For me, 'twill be my aim myself to raise Even to the flattering level of your praise; But if you'd have me always by your side, Then give me back the chest deep-breathed and wide, The low brow clustered with its locks of black, The flow of talk, the ready laugh, give back, The woes blabbed o'er our wine, when Cinara chose To teaze me, cruel flirt--ah, happy woes! Through a small hole a field-mouse, lank and thin, Had squeezed his way into a barley bin, And, having fed to fatness on the grain, Tried to get out, but tried and squeezed in vain. "Friend, " cried a weasel, loitering thereabout, "Lean you went in, and lean you must get out. " Now, at my head if folks this story throw, Whate'er I have I'm ready to forego; I am not one, with forced meats in my throat, Fine saws on poor men's dreamless sleep to quote. Unless in soul as very air I'm free, Not all the wealth of Araby for me. You've ofttimes praised the reverent, yet true Devotion, which my heart has shown for you. King, father, I have called you, nor been slack In words of gratitude behind your back; But even your bounties, if you care to try, You'll find I can renounce without a sigh. Not badly young Telemachus replied, Ulysses' son, that man so sorely tried: "No mettled steeds in Ithaca we want; The ground is broken there, the herbage scant. Let me, Atrides, then, thy gifts decline, In thy hands they are better far than mine!" Yes, little things fit little folks. In Rome The Great I never feel myself at home. Let me have Tibur, and its dreamful ease, Or soft Tarentum's nerve-relaxing breeze. Philip, the famous counsel, on a day-- A burly man, and wilful in his way-- From court returning, somewhere about two, And grumbling, for his years were far from few, That the Carinae [1] were so distant, though But from the Forum half a mile or so, Descried a fellow in a barber's booth, All by himself, his chin fresh shaved and smooth, Trimming his nails, and with the easy air Of one uncumbered by a wish or care. "Demetrius!"--'twas his page, a boy of tact, In comprehension swift, and swift in act, "Go, ascertain his rank, name, fortune; track His father, patron!" In a trice he's back. "An auction-crier, Volteius Mena, sir, Means poor enough, no spot on character, Good or to work or idle, get or spend, Has his own house, delights to see a friend, Fond of the play, and sure, when work is done, Of those who crowd the Campus to make one. "

 "I'd like to hear all from himself. Away, Bid him come dine with me--at once--to-day!" Mena some trick in the request divines, Turns it all ways, then civilly declines. "What! Says me nay?" "'Tis even so, sir. Why? Can't say. Dislikes you, or, more likely, shy. " Next morning Philip searches Mena out, And finds him vending to a rabble rout Old crazy lumber, frippery of the worst, And with all courtesy salutes him first. Mena pleads occupation, ties of trade, His service else he would by dawn have paid, At Philip's house, --was grieved to think, that how He should have failed to notice him till now. "On one condition I accept your plea. You come this afternoon, and dine with me. " "Yours to command. " "Be there, then, sharp at four! Now go, work hard, and make your little more!" At dinner Mena rattled on, expressed Whate'er came uppermost, then home to rest. The hook was baited craftily, and when The fish came nibbling ever and again, At morn a client, and, when asked to dine, Not now at all in humour to decline, Philip himself one holiday drove him down, To see his villa some few miles from town. Mena keeps praising up, the whole way there, The Sabine country, and the Sabine air; So Philip sees his fish is fairly caught, And smiles with inward triumph at the thought. Resolved at any price to have his whim, -- For that is best of all repose to him, -- Seven hundred pounds he gives him there and then, Proffers on easy terms as much again, And so persuades him, that, with tastes like his, He ought to buy a farm;--so bought it is. Not to detain you longer than enough, The dapper cit becomes a farmer bluff, Talks drains and subsoils, ever on the strain Grows lean, and ages with the lust of gain. But when his sheep are stolen, when murrains smite His goats, and his best crops are killed with blight, When at the plough his oxen drop down dead, Stung with his losses, up one night from bed He springs, and on a cart-horse makes his way, All wrath, to Philip's house, by break of day. "How's this?" cries Philip, seeing him unshorn And shabby. "Why, Vulteius, you look worn. You work, methinks, too long upon the stretch. " "Oh, that's not it, my patron. Call me wretch! That is the only fitting name for me. Oh, by thy Genius, by the gods that be Thy hearth's protectors, I beseech, implore, Give me, oh, give me back my life of yore!" If for the worse you find you've changed your place, Pause not to think, but straight your steps retrace. In every state the maxim still is true, On your own last take care to fit your shoe!

[1] The street where he lived, or, as we should say, "Ship Street. " The name was due probably to the circumstance of models of ships being set up in it. 

CHAPTER X. 

DELICACY OF HORACE'S HEALTH. --HIS CHEERFULNESS. --LOVE OF BOOKS. --HISPHILOSOPHY PRACTICAL. --EPISTLE TO AUGUSTUS. --DEATH. 

Horace had probably passed forty when the Epistle just quoted waswritten. Describing himself at forty-four (Epistles, I. 20), he sayshe was "prematurely grey, "--his hair, as we have just seen, havingbeen originally black, --adding that he is

 "In person small, one to whom warmth is life, In temper hasty, yet averse from strife. "

His health demanded constant care; and we find him writing (Epistles, I. 15) to a friend, to ask what sort of climate and people are to befound at Velia and Salernum, --the one a town of Lucania, the other ofCampania, --as he has been ordered by his doctor to give up hisfavourite watering-place, Baiae, as too relaxing. This doctor wasAntonius Musa, a great apostle of the cold-water cure, by which he hadsaved the life of Augustus when in extreme danger. The remedyinstantly became fashionable, and continued so until the Emperor'snephew, the young Marcellus, died under the treatment. Horace'sinquiries are just such as a valetudinarian fond of his comforts wouldbe likely to make:--

 "Which place is best supplied with corn, d'ye think? Have they rain-water or fresh springs to drink? Their wines I care not for, when at my farm I can drink any sort without much harm; But at the sea I need a generous kind To warm my veins, and pass into my mind, Enrich me with new hopes, choice words supply, And make me comely in a lady's eye. Which tract is best for game? on which sea-coast Urchins and other fish abound the most? That so, when I return, my friends may seeA sleek Phaeacian [1] come to life in me: These things you needs must tell me, Vala dear, And I no less must act on what I hear. " (C. )

[1] The Phaeacians were proverbially fond of good living. 

Valetudinarian though he was, Horace maintains, in his later as in hisearly writings, a uniform cheerfulness. This never forsakes him; forlife is a boon for which he is ever grateful. The gods have allottedhim an ample share of the means of enjoyment, and it is his own faultif he suffers self-created worries or desires to vex him. By thequestions he puts to a friend in one of the latest of his Epistles(II. 2), we see what was the discipline he applied to himself--

 "You're not a miser: has all other vice Departed in the train of avarice? Or do ambitious longings, angry fret, The terror of the grave, torment you yet? Can you make sport of portents, gipsy crones, Hobgoblins, dreams, raw head and bloody bones? Do you count up your birthdays year by year, And thank the gods with gladness and blithe cheer, O'erlook the failings of your friends, and grow Gentler and better as your sand runs low?" (C. )

And to this beautiful catalogue of what should be a good man's aims, let us add the picture of himself which Horace gives us in another andearlier Epistle (I. 18):--

 "For me, when freshened by my spring's pure cold, Which makes my villagers look pinched and old, What prayers are mine? 'O may I yet possess The goods I have, or, if heaven pleases, less! Let the few years that Fate may grant me still Be all my own, not held at others' will! Let me have books, and stores for one year hence, Nor make my life one flutter of suspense!' But I forbear; sufficient 'tis to pray To Jove for what he gives and takes away; Grant life, grant fortune, for myself I'll find That best of blessings--a contented mind. " (C. )

"Let me have books!" These play a great part in Horace's life. Theywere not to him, what Montaigne calls them, "a languid pleasure, " butrather as they were to Wordsworth--

 "A substantial world, both fresh and good, Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime and our happiness may grow. "

Next to a dear friend, they were Horace's most cherished companions. Not for amusement merely, and the listless luxury of the self-wraptlounger, were they prized by him, but as teachers to correct hisfaults, to subdue his evil propensities, to develop his higher nature, to purify his life (Epistles, I. 1), and to help him towards attaining"that best of blessings, a contented mind:"--

 "Say, is your bosom fevered with the fire Of sordid avarice or unchecked desire? Know there are spells will help you to allay The pain, and put good part of it away. You're bloated by ambition? take advice; Yon book will ease you, if you read it _thrice_. Run through the list of faults; whate'er you be, Coward, pickthank, spitfire, drunkard, debauchee, Submit to culture patiently, you'll find Her charms can humanise the rudest mind. " (C. )

Horace's taste was as catholic in philosophy as in literature. He wasof no school, but sought in the teachings of them all such principlesas would make life easier, better, and happier: "_Condo et compono, quae mox depromere possum_"--

 "I search and search, and where I find I lay The wisdom up against a rainy day. " (C. )

He is evermore urging his friends to follow his example;--to resortlike himself to these "spells, "--the _verba et voces_, by whichhe brought his own restless desires and disquieting aspirations intosubjection, and fortified himself in the bliss of contentment. He sawthey were letting the precious hours slip from their grasp, --hoursthat might have been so happy, but were so weighted with disquiet andweariness; and he loved his friends too well to keep silence on thistheme. We, like them, it has been admirably said, [Footnote: ÉtudeMorale et Littéraire sur les Epitres d'Horace; par J. A. Estienne. Paris, 1851. P. 212. ] are "possessed by the ambitions, the desires, theweariness, the disquietudes, which pursued the friends of Horace. Ifhe does not always succeed with us, any more than with them, in curingus of these, he at all events soothes and tranquillises us in themoments which we spend with him. He augments, on the other hand, thehappiness of those who are already happy; and there is not one of usbut feels under obligation to him for his gentle and salutarylessons, --_verbaque et voces_, --for his soothing or invigoratingbalsams, as much as though this gifted physician of soul and body hadcompounded them specially for ourselves. "

When he published the First Book of Epistles he seems to have thoughtthe time come for him to write no more lyrics (Epistles, I. 1):-

 "So now I bid my idle songs adieu, And turn my thoughts to what is just and true. " (C. )

Graver habits, and a growing fastidiousness of taste, were likely togive rise to this feeling. But a poet can no more renounce his lyrethan a painter his palette; and his fine "Secular Hymn, " and many ofthe Odes of the Fourth Book, which were written after this period, prove that, so far from suffering any decay in poetical power, he hadeven gained in force of conception, and in that _curiosafelicitas_, that exquisite felicity of expression, which has beenjustly ascribed to him by Petronius. Several years afterwards, whenwriting of the mania for scribbling verse which had beset the Romans, as if, like Dogberry's reading and writing, the faculty of writingpoetry came by nature, he alludes to his own sins in the samedirection with a touch of his old irony (Epistles, II. 1):-

 "E'en I, who vow I never write a verse, Am found as false as Parthia, maybe worse; Before the dawn I rouse myself and call For pens and parchment, writing-desk, and all. None dares be pilot who ne'er steered a craft; No untrained nurse administers a draught; None but skilled workmen handle workmen's tools; But verses all men scribble, wise or fools. " (C. )

Or, as Pope with a finer emphasis translates his words--

 "But those who cannot write, and those who can, All rhyme, and scrawl, and scribble to a man. "

It was very well for Horace to laugh at his own inability to abstainfrom verse-making, but, had he been ever so much inclined to silence, his friends would not have let him rest. Some wanted an Ode, some anEpode, some a Satire (Epistles, II. 2)--

 "Three hungry guests for different dishes call, And how's one host to satisfy them all?" (C. )

And there was one friend, whose request it was not easy to deny. Thiswas Augustus. Ten years after the imperial power had been placed inhis hands (B. C. 17) he resolved to celebrate a great national festivalin honour of his own successful career. Horace was called on to writean Ode, known in his works as "The Secular Hymn, " to be sung upon theoccasion by twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls of noble birth. "The Ode, " says Macleane, "was sung at the most solemn part of thefestival, while the Emperor was in person offering sacrifice at thesecond hour of the night, on the river side, upon three altars, attended by the fifteen men who presided over religious affairs. Theeffect must have been very beautiful, and no wonder if the impressionon Horace's feelings was strong and lasting. " He was obviously pleasedat being chosen for the task, and not without pride, --a very justone, --at the way it was performed. In the Ode (IV. 6), which seems tohave been a kind of prelude to the "Secular Hymn, " he anticipates thatthe virgins who chanted it will on their marriage-day be proud torecall the fact that they had taken part in this oratorio under hisbaton:-

 "When the cyclical year brought its festival days, My voice led the hymn of thanksgiving and praise, So sweet, the immortals to hear it were fain, And 'twas HORACE THE POET who taught me the strain!"

It was probably at the suggestion of Augustus, also, that he wrote themagnificent Fourth and Fourteenth Odes of the Fourth Book. These werewritten, however, to celebrate great national victories, and werepitched in the high key appropriate to the theme. But this was notenough for Augustus. He wanted something more homely and human, andwas envious of the friends to whom Horace had addressed the charmingEpistles of the First Book, a copy of which the poet had sent to himby the hands of a friend (Epistles, I. 13), but only to be given tothe Caesar, "If he be well, and in a happy mood, And ask to have them, --be it understood. "

And so he wrote to Horace--the letter is quoted by Suetonius--"Lookyou, I take it much amiss that none of your writings of this class areaddressed to me. Are you afraid it will damage your reputation withposterity to be thought to have been one of my intimates?" Such aletter, had Horace been a vain man or an indiscreet, might have misledhim into approaching Augustus with the freedom he courted. But he fellinto no such error. There is perfect frankness throughout the whole ofthe Epistle, with which he met the Emperor's request (II. 1), but thesocial distance between them is maintained with an emphasis which itis impossible not to feel. The Epistle opens by skilfully insinuatingthat, if the poet has not before addressed the Emperor, it is that hemay not be suspected of encroaching on the hours which were due to thehigher cares of state:--

 "Since you, great Caesar, singly wield the charge Of Rome's concerns, so manifold and large, -- With sword and shield the commonwealth protect, With morals grace it, and with laws correct, -- The bard, methinks, would do a public wrong, Who, having gained your ear, should keep it long. " (C. )

It is not while they live, he continues, that, in the ordinary case, the worth of the great benefactors of mankind is recognised. Onlyafter they are dead, do misunderstanding and malice give way toadmiration and love. Rome, it is true, has been more just. It hasappreciated, and it avows, how much it owes to Augustus. But the verysame people who have shown themselves wise and just in this are unableto extend the same principle to living literary genius. A poet musthave been long dead and buried, or he is nought. The very flaws of oldwriters are cried up as beauties by pedantic critics, while thehighest excellence in a writer of the day meets with no response. 

 "Had Greece but been as carping and as cold To new productions, what would now be old? What standard works would there have been, to come Beneath the public eye, the public thumb?" (C. )

Let us then look the facts fairly in the face; let us "clear our mindsof cant. " If a poem be bad in itself, let us say so, no matter how oldor how famous it be; if it be good, let us be no less candid, thoughthe poet be still struggling into notice among us. 

Thanks, he proceeds, to our happy times, men are now devotingthemselves to the arts of peace. "_Graecia capta ferum victoremcepit_"--"Her ruthless conqueror Greece has overcome. " The Romansof the better class, who of old thought only of the triumphs of theforum, or of turning over their money profitably, are now bitten by aliterary furor. 

 "Pert boys, prim fathers, dine in wreaths of bay, And 'twixt the courses warble out the lay. " (C. )

But this craze is no unmixed evil; for, take him all in all, your poetcan scarcely be a bad fellow. Pulse and second bread are a banquet forhim. He is sure not to be greedy or close-fisted; for to him, asTennyson in the same spirit says, "Mellow metres are more than ten percent. " Neither is he likely to cheat his partner or his ward. He maycut a poor figure in a campaign, but he does the state good service athome. 

 "His lessons form the child's young lips, and wean The boyish ear from words and tales unclean; As years roll on, he moulds the ripening mind, And makes it just and generous, sweet and kind; He tells of worthy precedents, displays The examples of the past to after days, Consoles affliction, and disease allays. " (C. )

Horace then goes on to sketch the rise of poetry and the drama amongthe Romans, glancing, as he goes, at the perverted taste which wasmaking the stage the vehicle of mere spectacle, and intimating his ownhigh estimate of the dramatic writer in words which Shakespeare seemsto have been meant to realise:--

 "That man I hold true master of his art, Who with fictitious woes can wring my heart; Can rouse me, soothe me, pierce me with the thrill Of vain alarm, and, as by magic skill, Bear me to Thebes, to Athens, where you will. " (C. )

Here, as elsewhere, Horace treats dramatic writing as the very highestexercise of poetic genius; and, in dwelling on it as he does, heprobably felt sure of carrying with him the fullest sympathies ofAugustus. For among his varied literary essays, the Emperor, like mostdilettanti, had tried his hand upon a tragedy. Failing, however, tosatisfy himself, he had the rarer wisdom to suppress it. The story ofhis play was that of Ajax, and when asked one day how it was gettingon, he replied that his hero "had finished his career upon a sponge!"--"_Ajacem suum in spongio incubuisse_. "

From the drama Horace proceeds to speak of the more timid race ofbards, who, "instead of being hissed and acted, would be read, " andwho, himself included, are apt to do themselves harm in various waysthrough over-sensitiveness or simplicity. Thus, for example, they willintrude their works on Augustus, when he is busy or tired; or wince, poor sensitive rogues, if a friend ventures to take exception to averse; or bore him by repeating, unasked, one or other of their petpassages, or by complaints that their happiest thoughts and mosthighly-polished turns escape unnoticed; or, worse folly than all, theywill expect to be sent for by Augustus the moment he comes acrosstheir poems, and told "to starve no longer, and go writing on. " Yet, continues Horace, it is better the whole tribe should be disappointed, than that a great man's glory should be dimmed, like Alexander's, bybeing sung of by a second-rate poet. And wherefore should it be so, when Augustus has at command the genius of such men as Virgil andVarius? They, and they only, are the fit laureates of the Emperor'sgreat achievements; and in this way the poet returns, like a skilfulcomposer, to the _motif_ with which he set out--distrust of hisown powers, which has restrained, and must continue to restrain, himfrom pressing himself and his small poetic powers upon the Emperor'snotice. 

In the other poems which belong to this period--the Second Epistle ofthe Second Book, and the Epistle to the Pisos, generally known as the_Ars Poetica_--Horace confines himself almost exclusively topurely literary topics. The dignity of literature was never bettervindicated than in these Epistles. In Horace's estimation it was athing always to be approached with reverence. Mediocrity in it wasintolerable. Genius is much, but genius without art will not winimmortality; "for a good poet's made, as well as born. " There must bea working up to the highest models, a resolute intolerance of anythingslight or slovenly, a fixed purpose to put what the writer has toexpress into forms at once the most beautiful, suggestive, andcompact. The mere trick of literary composition Horace holdsexceedingly cheap. Brilliant nonsense finds no allowance from him. Truth--truth in feeling and in thought--must be present, if the workis to have any value. "_Scribendi recte sapere est et principium etfons_, "--

 "Of writing well, be sure the secret lies In wisdom, therefore study to be wise. " (C. )

Whatever the form of composition, heroic, didactic, lyric, ordramatic, it must be pervaded by unity of feeling and design; and nostyle is good, or illustration endurable, which, either overlays ordoes not harmonise with the subject in hand. 

The Epistle to the Pisos does not profess to be a complete expositionof the poet's art. It glances only at small sections of that widetheme. So far as it goes, it is all gold, full of most instructivehints for a sound critical taste and a pure literary style. It wasprobably meant to cure the younger Piso of that passion for writingverse which had, as we have seen, spread like a plague among theRomans, and which made a visit to the public baths a penance tocritical ears, --for there the poetasters were always sure of anaudience, --and added new terrors to the already sufficientlyformidable horrors of the Roman banquet. [Footnote: This theory hasbeen worked out with great ability by the late M. A. Baron, in his'Epitre d'Horace aux Pisons sur l'Art Poétique'--Bruxelles, 1857;which is accompanied by a masterly translation and notes of greatvalue. ] When we find an experienced critic like Horace urging youngPiso, as he does, to keep what he writes by him for nine years, theconclusion is irresistible, that he hoped by that time the writerwould see the wisdom of suppressing his crude lucubrations altogether. No one knew better than Horace that first-class work never wants suchprotracted mellowing. 

Soon, after this poem was written the great palace on the Esquilinelost its master. He died (B. C. 8) in the middle of the year, bequeathing his poet-friend to the care of Augustus in the words"_Horati Flacci, ut mei, esto memor_, "--"Bear Horace in yourmemory as you would myself. " But the legacy was not long upon theemperor's hands. Seventeen years before, Horace had written:

 "Think not that I have sworn a bootless oath; Yes, we shall go, shall go, Hand linked in hand, where'er thou leadest, both The last sad road below. "

The lines must have rung in the poet's ears like a sad refrain. TheDigentia lost its charm; he could not see its crystal waters for theshadows of Charon's rueful stream. The prattle of his loved Bandusianspring could not wean his thoughts from the vision of his other selfwandering unaccompanied along that "last sad road. " We may fancy thatHorace was thenceforth little seen in his accustomed haunts. He whohad so often soothed the sorrows of other bereaved hearts, answeredwith a wistful smile to the friendly consolations of the many thatloved him. His work was done. It was time to go away. Not all theskill of Orpheus could recall him whom he had lost. The welcome endcame sharply and suddenly; and one day, when, the bleak November windwas whirling down the oak-leaves on his well-loved brook, the servantsof his Sabine farm heard that they should no more see the good, cheerymaster, whose pleasant smile and kindly word had so often made theirlabours light. There was many a sad heart, too, we may be sure, inRome, when the wit who never wounded, the poet who ever charmed, thefriend who never failed, was laid in a corner of the Esquiline, closeto the tomb of his "dear knight Maecenas. " He died on the 27thNovember B. C. 8, the kindly, lonely man, leaving to Augustus whatlittle he possessed. One would fain trust his own words were inscribedupon his tomb, as in the supreme hour the faith they expressed was ofa surety strong within his heart, --

NON OMNIS MORIAR.