battle of Philippi that Horace was introduced through Virgil's means to the rich and powerful friend whose patronage was to colour so pleasantly his future life for more than thirty years. And it fell at the time of life at which such a trial is, if not most lightly felt, at least most sanguinely borne,-from his twentythird to his twenty-sixth year. Yet we may well believe it to have been such a trial as would test the genuineness of that philosophical equanimity which he had learnt to profess from the field-preaching of Ofellus and the set lectures of the Roman and Athenian schools. There are strong indications in his poetry of a critical appreciation of the inevitable discomforts of absolute poverty, pauperies immunda, drawn either from actual acquaintance with her, or from having hovered on its verge. A prouder moralist or a vainer man than Horace might have professed himself with equal sincerity ready to wrap himself in his virtue's folds on occasion, but would not so honestly have let it appear that he did prefer a cottage to be ornée after all. If the liberality of Maecenas or others had not rescued him from the uncertainty of the position in which he was placed by the fall of his party, the Satires of Horace might have been sterner and stronger; the genial smile with which he uttered an unpalatable. truth might have been changed for a sardonic laugh; but the happy grace and cheerfulness of the lyric poems would hardly have reached the pitch of perfect elaboration which has done so much to render them immortal. Horace might have spoken more directly and more forcibly to the masses of the Rome of his own day; but his thoughts and the expression of them would not have remained so long in perfect tune with the sympathies of a cultivated and critical, though narrow, audience through generation after generation. In estimating the effect which these lyrics were likely to produce at the time of their publication, as well as the artistic labour involved in their composition, we should not overlook the novelty of their Greek measures to the Roman ear as adapted to the Latin language. To our own tutored comprehension or acceptation of the lyrical metres of classical poetry, an Alcaic or Sapphic stanza written after the laws of quantity, accent, and cæsura, by which we conceive Horace to have been bound, rings as genuine and natural as an authentic fragment of Alcæus or Sappho. The instinct which teaches us in our own language to fill out a simpler, looser, and more uniform framework of metrical cadence with the chronic repetition of particular burdens of sound which we call rhyme, is quite alien from any special quickness in distinguishing the comparative adaptability of ancient languages for measures involving quick and complicated variations of time. To the metrical sense of a Teutonic, Celtic, and even a modern Greek or Italian ear, the ancient theory of verse is so infinitely remote and intangible in its logical completeness, that all its exemplifications appear to be projected upon the same plane. It can hardly be doubted that the pervading analogy of the two languages in point of grammatical inflection was among the main causes which rendered feasible the application of a Greek metre to Latin words, while the great dissimilarity of modern languages in this respect from either Greek or Latin is one of the most insurmountable bars in the way of the perverted ingenuity which floods modern Europe with so many hopeless attempts to revive and naturalise a dead system of classical versification. Yet even with the encouragement and facility dependent upon this analogy, the task which Horace and Catullus undertook in moulding the structure of their own language to the requisitions of Greek modes of music was a new, a bold, and not an inconsiderable one; and such both Horace and his contemporaries felt it to be. His confidence in the stability of his own monument of literary fame is made to rest mainly on his having been "The first with poet fire And we have Ovid's authority to show the appreciation of his merit and success in this point among the scholars and poets of the day. As in the case of Columbus's egg, the difficulty when once overcome may have appeared to vanish altogether; although no later Roman lyrist ever solved the problem with the perfect success and apparent ease of Horace. But the difficulty was none the less real; and its existence involved the certainty of finding at first only a small and select circle of friendly listeners. The tuning of Horace's foreign lyrical "barbiton" must have been caviare to the Roman multitude until the tones had become familiar, almost as generally as if he had continued to write his lyrics in the language from which he drew his forms, and in which his earliest poems are reported to have been written. It would be difficult to find a better illustration of the truth of the saying "Græcia capta ferum victorem cepit❞— than Horace's poetry. It is not only the metrical mould that has been imposed upon the literature of the conquerors by the conquered race. The whole style is redolent of Attic culture. The mythological fables of which such frequent and effective use is made are nearly all of Greek origin. The classical landscape is studded mainly with Greek figures, and they are Olympian deities which shine through the clouds. Allusions to the fortunes of Europa, Helen, the Danaides, and Danaë, are more -- It is Yet frequent, and more picturesquely drawn out in support of whatever moral the song of the moment may enfold, than references to the legendary history of Rome. Macaulay's Lays give us more pictures of the Rome of the kings and the early republic than Horace's four books of Odes all together. The very phraseology in which Horace utters all that he has to say of what shall happen to the soul after death, is, except one or two words, borrowed from the same repertory of Greek poetry. Tullus and Ancus are treated as symbols of what is gone for ever and mingled with the dust of the earth, rather than as personages who once might have had an individuality of their own. only when the subject suggests an allusion to later Roman history, to Regulus or Hannibal,-to that which Horace knew as a political student or observer, not as a mere reader of traditionary chronicles, that the Roman nationality of the poet's mind flashes out in a grand burst of eloquent Italian declamation. The ornaments of his lyrical structure were in general designed and sculptured in the same Greek taste as the structure itself. the character of the scenery which he describes is not Greek, but Italian. We see Soracte and its snows, not Täygetum or Parnassus. We burn the good logs of Algidus, not the splintery olives of the plain of Athens. It is the broad and tawny Tiber of which we breast the stream, not the swollen mountain torrents of Greece that we struggle to ford. The life, the businesses, the pastimes, which are brought before us are those of the imperial city of the day, although the accessories, the tricks of art, and the refinements of imagination, the episodes, and the mythology, all savour of the Academic education which Horace enjoyed, in company and in emulation of so many of the noblest Romans. The arts of Greece have truly been brought in to adorn the subject-matter of rustic Latium. What we see is indeed Italy, and Italy painted by an Italian hand and eye. But the eye has been trained to observe the distinctive beauties of its native landscape by travel abroad, and the hand has been practised in all the cunning and the secrets of the great guild of Grecian literature. Cicero's letters to Atticus appear to overflow involuntarily with extracted or original aphorisms and witticisms in Greek. Yet they are not the less the letters of a true Roman. The same familiar intercourse with a foreign school of thought and cultivation told similarly upon Horace in forming his manner, and equally without destroying his intrinsically national and individual character. Passing from the Odes to the Satires and Epistles,-from clear and highly pitched musical tones to the sermo pedestris of the cheerful and friendly but critical moraliser, we find less to remind us of Greek art, and more of an indigenous and popular style and method. Their different scope admits of, or rather compels, a more simple and flowing treatment. They were mostly, though not all, ostensibly written for a larger and less fastidious audience, to each of whom the poet could speak in the character of a genial, yet serious, monitor. No words are too plain, no topics too ordinary, for the purpose of showing his readers that a man might smile and smile, and prose and prose, and yet speak a truth which would be worth remembering. Pope's translations, admirable as they are, appear to us to show a more constant anxiety for sparkling point and elaborate terseness than is to be found in the Latin originals. The terseness of Horace's language in his satires is that of a proverb,-neat, because homely; while the terseness of Pope is that of an epigram, which will only become homely in time because it is neat. Mr. Martin no doubt expresses the feeling of a large class of Horace's readers when he speaks of the Satires and Epistles as intrinsically more valuable than the lyrical poetry. It is quite true that, as reflecting "the age and body of the time," they do possess the highest historical importance. "Through them," says Mr. Martin, scarcely too positively, "the modern scholar is able to form a clearer idea, in all probability, of the state of society in Rome in the Augustan age than of any other phase of social development in the history of nations. Mingling, as Horace did, freely with men of all ranks and passions, and himself untouched by the ambition of wealth or influence which absorbed them in the struggle of society, he enjoyed the best opportunities for observation, and he used them diligently. Horace's observation of character is subtle and exact, his knowledge of the heart is profound, his power of graphic delineation great. A genial humour plays over his verses, and a kindly wisdom dignifies them. As a living and brilliant commentary on life; as a storehouse of maxims of practical wisdom, couched in language the most apt and concise; as a picture of men and manners, which will be always fresh and always true, because they were true once, and because human nature will always reproduce itself under analogous circumstances,-his Satires, and still more his Epistles, will have a permanent value for mankind." Yet, true as this laudation is, we must confess that to ourselves the Odes are incomparably more interesting. Horace himself valued them much more highly; and while their perfection of art has remained unrivalled in Latin lyrical poetry, the crown of Latin satire found a nobler wearer in a later generation of imperial Rome. No doubt the age of Domitian afforded more constant matter for a burning, indignant heart to feed upon and turn into the fierce flame of satirical verse than the reign of Augustus. But if Horace had written in the time of Juvenal, and Juvenal in that of Horace, their natures, however modified by circumstance, would not have been counterchanged as well as their positions. The sterner, loftier, and less elastic soul of Juvenal has scored a deeper line with the satiric stylus than Horace, and has outgone him in the use and improvement of his own weapons. The question of their comparative superiority as satiric poets is not affected by the palpable distinction between the respective objects of simple folly and sheer vice, at which their verses were aimed. Which of them shot the straightest and the most powerfully to the heart of the figure he aimed at, whether that figure were a hideous or a merely laughable monster, is the true criterion. The powerful, earnest, savage, yet trained and logical precision of Juvenal must surely have struck deeper into, and dwelt longer in, the conscience and memory of his own listeners, than the easy, discursive, conversational grace which marks the friend of Macenas. Horace may be the pleasanter companion, laughing as he chides; but it is difficult to read one of Juvenal's satires without the thrill which sympathises with the concentrated expression of a noble patriotic passion under the form of a calm irony. Juvenal, as well as Horace, smiles as he chides and sings; but it is the smile of sadness, and his voice is full of those subdued tears which give to song so much of its charm. Our acquaintance with the personal character of Horace is far deeper, and therefore psychologically more interesting, than if his Satires and Epistles had not been preserved to us. Juvenal was personally like we can only guess; but yet his heart is more unreservedly flung into the poetry of his satires than was that of his predecessor, who looked upon such verses as belonging to the sermo pedestris, and reserved all his labour and art for his Odes. A poet is then at his best as a poet when he most fully forgets himself in the theme of his song. Horace never forgot himself; but the memory of the models he was striving to imitate, and the conscientious laboriousness with which he there worked out the theory of his art to the greatest perfection of form which he could give it, throw the personality of his poetry into a more picturesque form and proportion in the lyrics, upon which he built his expectations of posthumous fame. What |