No one denies that there are greater poets than Horace; and much has been said in disparagement even of some of the merits most popularly assigned to him, by scholars who have, nevertheless, devoted years of laborious study to the correction of his text or the elucidation of his meaning. But whatever his faults or deficiencies, he has remained unexcelled in that special gift of genius which critics define by the name of charm. No collection of small poems, ancient or modern, has so universally pleased the taste of all nations as Horace's Odes, or been so steadfastly secure from all the capricious fluctuations of time and fashion. In vain have critics insisted on the superior genius evinced in the scanty relics left to us of the Greek lyrists, and even on the more spontaneous inspiration which they detect in the exquisite delicacy of form that distinguishes the muse of Catullus. Horace still reigns supreme as the lyrical singer most enthroned in the affections, most congenial to the taste, of the complex

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multitude of students in every land and in every age.

It is an era in the life of the schoolboy when he first commences his acquaintance with Horace. He gets favourite passages by heart with a pleasure which (Homer alone excepted) no other ancient poet inspires. Throughout life the lines so learnt remain on his memory, rising up alike in gay and in grave moments, and applying themselves to varieties of incident and circumstance with the felicitous suppleness of proverbs. Perhaps in the interval between boyhood and matured knowledge of the world, the attractive influence of Horace is suspended in favour of some bolder poet adventuring far beyond the range of his temperate though sunny genius, into the extremes of heated passion or frigid metaphysics

wisdom, his manly sense, his exquisite combination of playful irony and cordial earnestness. They then discover in him innumerable beauties before unnoticed, and now enjoyed the more for their general freedom from those very efforts at intense emotion and recondite meaning for which, in the revolutionary period of youth, they admired the writers who appear to them, when reason and fancy adjust their equilibrium in the sober judgment of maturer years, feverishly exaggerated or tediously speculative. That the charm of Horace is thus general and thus imperishable, is a proposition which needs no proof. It is more interesting and less trite to attempt to analyse the secrets of that charm, and see how far the attempt may suggest hints of art to the numberless writers of those poems which aim at the title of lyrical composition, and are either the trinkets of a transitory fashion, or the ornaments of enduring vogue, according as they fail or succeed in concentrating the rays of poetry into the compactness and solidity of imperishable gems.

The first peculiar excellence of Horace is in his personal character and temperament rather than his intellectual capacities; it is in his genial humanity. He touches us on so many sides of our common nature; he has sympathies with such infinite varieties of men; he is so equally at home with us in town and country, in our hours of mirth, in our moments of dejection. Are we poor? he invests poverty with a cheerful grace. Are we rich he inculcates moderation, and restrains us from purse-pride with the kindliness of a spirit free from asceticism, and sensitive to the true enjoyments of life. His very defects and weaknesses of character serve to increase his attraction; he is not too much elevated above our own erring selves.

Next to the charm of his humanity is that of his disposition towards the agreeable aspects of

our mortal state. He invests the virtues of patience amidst the trials of adversity with the dignity of a serene sweetness, and exalts even the frivolities of worldly pleasure with associations of heartfelt friendship and the refinements of music and song. Garlands entwined with myrtle, and wine-cups perfumed with nard, seem fit emblems of the banqueter who, when he indulges his Genius, invokes the Muse and invites the Grace. With this tender humanity and with this pleasurable temperament is blended a singular manliness of sentiment. In no poet can be found lines that more rouse, or more respond to, the generous impulse of youth towards fortitude and courage, sincerity and honour, devoted patriotism, the superiority of mind over the vicissitudes of fortune, and a healthful reliance on the wisdom and goodness of the one divine providential Power, who has no likeness and no second, even in the family of Olympus.

Though at times he speaks as the Epicurean, at other times as the Stoic, and sometimes as both in the same poem, he belongs exclusively to neither school. Out of both he has poetised a philosophy of his own, which, even in its inconsistencies, establishes a harmony with our own inconsistent natures; for most men are to this day in part Epicurean, in part Stoic. Horace is the poet of Eclecticism.

From the width of his observation, and the generalising character of his reasoning powers, Horace is more emphatically the representative of civilisation than any other extant lyrical poet. Though describing the manners of his own time, he deals in types and pictures, sentiments and opinions, in which every civilised time finds likeness and expression. Hence men of the world claim him as one of their order, and they cheerfully accord to him an admiration which they scarcely concede to any other poet. It is not only the easy good

nature of his philosophy, and his lively wit, that secure to him this distinction, but he owes much also to that undefinable air of goodbreeding which is independent of all conventional fashions, and is recognised in every society where the qualities that constitute goodbreeding are esteemed. Catullus has quite as much wit, and is at least as lax, where he appears in the character of a man of pleasure -Catullus is equally intimate with the great men of his time, and in grace of diction is by many preferred to Horace; yet Catullus has never attained to the same oracular eminence as Horace among men of the world, and does not, in their eyes, command the same rank in that high class of gentlemen-thorough-bred authors. For if we rightly interpret genius by ingenium-viz., the inborn spirit which accommodates all conventional circumstances around it to its own native property of form and growth-there is a genius of gentleman as there is a genius of poet. That which his countrymen called urbanitas, in contradistinction to provincial narrowness of mind or vulgarity of taste, to false finery and affected pretence, is the essential attribute of this son of the Venusian freedman. And with this quality, which needs for brilliant development familiar converse with the types of mind formed by a polished metropolis, Horace preserves, in a degree unknown to those who, like Pope and Boileau, resemble him more or less on the town-bred side of his character, the simple delight in rural nature, which makes him the favourite companion of those whom cool woodlands, peopled with the beings of fable, "set apart from the crowd." He might be as familiar with Sir Philip Sidney in the shades of Penshurst, as with Lord Chesterfield in the saloons of Mayfair. And out of this rare combination of practical wisdom and poetical sentiment there grows that

noblest part of his moral teaching which is distinct from schools and sects, and touches at times upon chords more spiritual than those who do not look below the surface would readily detect. Hence, in spite of his occasional sins, he has always found indulgent favour with the clergy of every Church. Among the dozen books which form the library of the village curé of France, Horace is sure to be one; and the greatest dignitaries of our own Church are among his most sedulous critics and his warmest panegyrists. With all his melancholy conceptions of the shadow-land beyond the grave, and the half-sportive, half-pathetic injunction, therefore, to make the most of the passing hour, there lies deep within his heart a consciousness of nobler truths which, ever and anon, finds impressive utterance, suggesting precepts and hinting consolations that elude the rod of Mercury, and do not accompany the dark flock to the shores of Styx:

"Virtus recludens immeritis mori

Cœlum negata tentat iter via."

Thus we find his thoughts interwoven with Milton's later meditations; and Condorcet, baffled in aspirations of human perfectibility on earth, dies in his dungeon with Horace by his side, open at the verse which says, by what arts of constancy and fortitude in mortal travail Pollux and Hercules attained to the citadels of light.

It is, then, mainly to this large and many-sided nature in the man himself that Horace owes his unrivalled popularity-a popularity which has indeed both widened in its circle and deepened in its degree in proportion to the increase of modern civilisation. And as the popularity is thus so much derived from the qualities in which the man establishes friendly intimacy with all ranks of his species, so it is accompanied with that degree of personal affection which few writers have the happiness to inspire.

We give willing ear to the praise of his merits, and feel a certain displeasure at the criticisms which appear harshly to qualify and restrict them; we are indulgent to his faults, and rejoice when the diligent research and kindly enthusiasm of German scholars redeem his good name from any aspersions that had been too lightly credited. It pleases us to think that most, perhaps all, among his erotic poems which had left upon our minds a painful impression, and which a decorous translator shuns, are no genuine expressions of the poet's own sentiment or taste, but merely a Roman artist's translation or paraphrase from the Greek originals. We readily grant the absurdity of any imputation upon the personal courage of Brutus's young officer, founded upon the modest confession, that on the fatal field of Philippi, when those who most vaunted their valour fled in panic or bit the dust, he too had left his shield not too valiantly behind him; he who, in the same poem, addressed to a brother soldier, tells us that he had gone through the worst extremities in that bloody war. For those panegyrics on Augustus which, in our young days, we regarded as a renegade flattery bestowed upon a man who had destroyed the political liberties for which the poet had fought, we accept the rational excuses which are suggested by our own maturer knowledge of life and of the grateful human heart, and our profounder acquaintance with the events and circumstances of the age. We see in the poems themselves, when fairly examined, with what

evident sincerity Horace vindicates his enthusiastic admiration of a prince whom he identifies with the establishment of safety to property and life, with the restoration of arts and letters, with the reform of manners and the amelioration of laws. We can understand with what genuine horror a patriot so humane must have regarded the fratricide of intestine wars, and with what honest gratitude so ardent a lover of repose and peace would have exclaimed,

"Custode rerum Cæsare non furor Civilis aut vis exiget otium." If to the rule of one man this blessed change was to be ascribed, and if public opinion so gratefully endorsed that assumption, that the people themselves placed their ruler in the order of Divinities-it scarcely needs even an excuse for the poet that he joined in the general apotheosis of the great prince, who to him was the benignant protector and the sympathising friend. What has passed in our own time in France renders more clear to us the general state of feeling in Rome. When the population have once tasted the security of established order, and, with terrified remembrance of the bloodshed and havoc of a previous anarchy, felt the old liberty rather voluntarily slip than be violently wrenched from their hands, a benevolent autocracy that consults the public opinion which installs it, seems a blessing to the many, and is accepted as a necessity by the few. And if the professed statesmen and political thinkers of the time-the Pollios

and the Messalas, the most eminent partisans of M. Antony, the noblest companions of Brutus-acquiesced, with the more courtly and consistent Mæcenas, in the established government of Augustus, it would indeed be no reproach to a man whose mind habitually shunned gloomy anticipations of the distant future, that he could not foresee the terrible degeneration of manners and the military despotism which were destined to grow out of the clement autocracy of that accomplished prince who had won the title of "father of his country," and who might be seen on summer evenings angling in the Tiber, or stretched upon its banks amidst a ring of laughing children, with whom the Emperor whose word gave law to the Indian and the Mede was playing with nuts and pebbles.

What Horace was as man, can, however, furnish but little aid to those who desire to rival him as poet (and let every schoolboy who writes his first song to Mary or the Moon aim at the highest; nothing is too arduous for mortal on the sunny side of twenty)-little aid, indeed, except as it may serve to show how far a genial and cordial temperament, an independent and manly spirit, and a fellowship with mankind in their ordinary pursuits and tastes, contribute to the culture and amenities of the poet who would make his monument more lasting than bronze and more lofty than the pyramids. But in Horace, as artist, we may perhaps, on close examination, discover some peculiarities of conception and form sufficiently marked and pervasive to evince that with him they were rules of art; so successful as to make them worthy of study, and hitherto so little noticed, even by his most elaborate critics, as to justify our attempt to render them more generally intelligible and instructive.

In what we are about to say on this head, we confine our remarks

to the short lyrical pieces to which commentators after his time gave the name of Odes, and on which his eminence as a poet must mainly rely. Whatever merit be ascribed to his Satires, it is scarcely in the power of genius to raise satire to an elevated rank in poetry. Satire, indeed, is the antipodes of poetry in its essence and its mission. Satire always tends to dwarf, and it cannot fail to caricature; but poetry does nothing if it does not tend to enlarge and exalt, and if it does not seek rather to beautify than deform. And though such didactic and moralising vein as belongs to the Epistles of Horace be in itself much higher than satire, and in him has graces of style that, with his usual consummate taste, he rejects for satire, which he regards but as a rhythmical prose, still, the higher atmosphere in which the genius of lyrical song buoys and disports itself is not within the scope of that didactic form of poetry which "walks highest but not flies." Hegel, in his luminous classification of the various kinds of poetry, has perhaps somewhat too sharply drawn the line between its several degrees of rank; yet every one acquainted with the rudimentary principles of criticism must acknowledge that just as it requires a larger combination of very rare gifts to write an epic or a drama which the judgment of ages allows to be really great, than to write a lyrical poem, so it demands a much finer combination of some of the rarest of those rare gifts to write a lyrical poem which becomes the song of all times and nations, than to write a brilliant sarcasm upon human infirmities, or an elegant lecture in the style of an Epistle. These last require but talents, however great, which are more or less within the province of prose writers. The novel of 'Gil Blas' or the Essays of Montaigne evince qualities of genius equal at least to those displayed in Horace's Satires and Epistles. But if you