CARM. XXIII. Vitas hinnuleo me similis, Chloë, Aurarum et siluæ metu. Nam seu mobilibus veris inhorruit Et corde et genibus tremit. Atqui non ego te, tigris ut aspera nature, but I do not think such nicety of observation is a characteristic of Horace. The simile itself of the fawn is rather a proof of the contrary; for the fawn just missing her dam is by no means of an age to be wooed, nor does she attract the courtship of the male till she has parted company with the mother altogether, and is mingling with the other does. ODE XXIV. TO VIRGIL ON THE DEATH OF QUINCTILIUS VARUS. Quinctilius died A.U.C. 730. Little is known of him beyond the mention with which he is immortalised by Horace. In the Ars Poetica he is spoken of as dead, and as having been a frank and judiciously severe critic, who, if you trusted What shame or what restraint unto the yearning So, the eternal slumber clasps Quinctilius, your Whose equal when shall shame-faced sense of Honour, Incorrupt Faith, of Justice the twin sister, Or Truth disguiseless, find? By many a good man wept, he died ;-no mourner Quinctilius from the gods; Not on such terms they lent him!-Were thy harp-strings Which Hermes, not reopening Fate's closed portal 1 'Præcipe' lead.'-YONGE. your verses to him, would bid you correct this and that. If you replied you could not do better-that you had tried twice or thrice in vain-he would tell you to strike the lines out altogether, and put them anew on the forge. This character as critic is in harmony with the character here assigned to him as man (verses 7, 8). CARM. XXIV. Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus Ergo Quinctilium perpetuus sopor Multis ille bonis flebilis occidit; Quod si Threïcio blandius Orpheo Non lenis precibus fata recludere, Quidquid corrigere est nefas. ODE X X V. TO LYDIA. Little need be said about this poem. The reader has been already warned against the assumption that in the application of names, evidently fictitious, to poems of this kind, the same person is designated by the same name. It is obviously too absurd to suppose that the blooming Lydia of the 13th Ode in this very Book is identical with the faded hag lampooned in the following ode. The poem itself is, with others of the same kind, only valuable as illustrative of Horace's character on its urban or town-bred side -its combination of the man of a fashionable world when at Rome, and of the solitary poet wrapped in his fancies, and meditating More rarely now shake thy closed windows Once turning so glib on its hinges. Thou hear'st less and less, 'Lydia, sleep'st thou ? I thine own lover!' Now thou whin'st that this new generation Winter's cold comrade? 1 'Hebro'-a river in Thrace as we should say, to the north pole.' meditating his art amidst Sabine woods or in the watered valleys of Tibur. In the translation, the third and fourth. stanzas of the original are omitted. In these omitted stanzas the taste is sufficiently bad to vitiate the poetry. Horace never writes worse than when he is cynical. Cynicism was in him a spurious affectation, contrary to his genuine nature, which was singularly susceptible to amiable, graceful, generous, and noble impressions of man and of life. CARM. XXV. Parcius junctas quatiunt fenestras Quæ prius multum facilis movebat Invicem mochos anus arrogantes Cum tibi flagrans amor et libido, Læta quod pubes hedera virente Dedicet Hebro.1 |