time. It seems from the Epistle to Florus that Horace at this time had to resist the urgency of friends begging him to write, one in this style and another in that, and that he had no desire to gratify them and to sacrifice his own ease to a pursuit in which it is plain he never took any great delight. He was likely to bring to it less energy, as his life was drawing prematurely to a close through infirmities either contracted or aggravated during his irrational campaigning with Brutus, his inaptitude for which he appears afterwards to have been perfectly aware of. He continued to apply himself to the study of moral philosophy till his death, which took place on the 27th November, A.U.c. 746, or B.C. 8, in the fifty-seventh year of his age, and within a few days of its completion. Maecenas died the same year, also towards the close of it; a coincidence that has led some to the notion that Horace hastened his own death that he might not have the pain of surviving his patron. According to Suetonius his death (which he places after his fifty-ninth year, as the text erroneously stands) was so sudden that he had not time to execute his will, which is opposed to the notion of suicide. The two friends were buried near one another "in extremis Esquiliis,” in the farthest part of the Esquiliae, that is probably without the city walls, on the ground drained and laid out in gardens by Maecenas.

The plan adopted in this Edition, of commenting on each poem in a separate Introduction, renders it unnecessary to say much in this place upon Horace's style and character. The particular style in which his principle strength lay will be always matter of opinion. My own is, that he is nowhere so great as in the Odes, and that of these his genius is best shown in the Odes that relate to public affairs or men, while in some of the small occasional pieces, as the Ode to the Fountain of Bandusia, that on the death of Quintilius, and others, much grace and feeling are shown. I cannot at all agree with those who think that amatory verse-writing was Horace's strong point. With rare exceptions his compositions of this kind, however elegant they may be, appear frigid and passionless, bearing the stamp of imitation, with unequivocal signs of art, and none of nature. The crowd of mistresses that have been gathered for him out of his poems is beyond belief; and the laborious. folly that has tried to classify his amours, and to follow chronologically the shifting of his affections, I have had occasion to notice. It proceeds upon an interpretation of the Odes which is foreign to their true character. Horace was neither more nor less licentious probably than most of his contemporaries, though his biographer Suetonius charges him with gross sensuality; but, however this may be, that the women of his Odes are in nearly every instance fictitious I have no doubt whatever. Cinara" seems to represent a real person; and with

5 C. iv. 1. 4, 13. 22; Epp. i. 14. 33.

Canidia some real intrigue and jealousy no doubt are connected, whatever her name may have been.

The same remark applies in some measure to other Odes addressea nominally to friends, but which might as easily be addressed to one friend as to another. The difference is that the names are in most instances known to be those of real persons, which has led many commentators into inferences respecting the characters and circumstances of those persons which I believe to be in most instances imaginary.

I have expressed my opinion of Horace as a Satirical writer in various places. On this point the reader may refer to the remarks in the Introduction to the ninth Satire of the first book. Of common sense and a perception of the ridiculous; of that knowledge of mankind which is gathered by mixing with the world; of dramatic skill; of good nature and good breeding, Horace has shown sufficient proofs, both in the Satires and the Epistles. As a critic he is certainly defective. Homer he does not appear to have understood. Plautus and Terence he could not appreciate, and the merits of Lucilius (and he must have had merits) would probably never have been acknowledged or discovered by Horace but for the feeling his criticism of that writer raised against himself. He was of an indolent habit, of which the unfinished state of some of his poems is one of the effects. "Amphora coepit Institui; currente rota cur urceus exit ?" is a question that might be applied, I think, to more than one of his Satires and Epistles. There is more inequality in these than in the Odes; more also that is common-place in thought and diction. The Odes will bear better than the Satires and Epistles the close inspection that an editor is obliged to give them. Any one who undertakes that office for Horace will find that one of his principal difficulties consists in the examination, first separately, and then collectively, of so many small pictures as the Odes present. The tendency of commentators to far-fetched conjectures as to their scope, allusions, date, &c., is very great, and the above difficulty partly accounts for it. Their beauties and merits appear to me to be of a quiet kind, and the happy selection of words is one of them. Horace's selection of epithets is judicious and forcible. "Mirus ac paene divinus Horatius est in epithetis inveniendis "." The terseness and good sense of the sayings which concern human life and character are as striking as the manner in which they are introduced, being always in their place and never brought in clumsily, as such sentences with less art might easily appear. Herein, more than in any other respect, Horace succeeded in his attempt to imitate the Greek Lyric poets. Their fire, passion, sublimity, his language was incapable of expressing, even if his mind could have conceived them. Their metres have lost their strength

6 Lambinus.

in his hands, and have passed into a smooth monotony, which none but an emasculated taste can admire when compared with the Greek originals. Some may doubt whether the defect does not lie in the language, and perhaps in some degree it does; but the later Sapphic Odes are more like the Greek in point of rhythm, and are so far an improvement upon the earlier ones. Some of the more difficult long metres have been as successfully imitated as the language allowed, but many have not been attempted.

Horace's religious opinions have been a good deal discussed. But he does not appear at any time to have been very decided in his opinions. He was upwards of forty when he declared of himself that he was like a ship driven by a tempest, going this way or that, according as the wind happened to set. He was now a rigid moralist, now a materialist, now a Stoic, now an Epicurean, now a Cyrenaic. To judge him by his own writings, he seems to have thought that the enjoyment of the present hour was the end of man's life. He nowhere puts forward the happiness of another world as the compensation for the inequalities of this, nor does he make any allusion to another state of existence at all, except in the ordinary fabulous way. The certainty of death and the uncertainty of life are only arguments with him for making the most of the pleasures we possess, but all in the way of moderation, which is a common-place much dwelt upon by Horace, as also is the possession and use of riches. Once, if we are to take him at his word, he was startled by a storm, and induced from an idler to become serious; that is, to put away the doctrines of Epicurus, for what length of time we do not know. But of systems he appears to have known little. He ridicules them all in their turn.

After Maecenas had given him his farm, he lived there a good deal and improved it at much expense. He had a liking for the country, and has some beautiful descriptions of it. But when in the country he no doubt felt lonely, and missed the tables and society of his city friends. He dined a good deal with rich people, but his own fare at home was of the simplest kind. He describes his daily life in the city, when he happened to be disengaged, in the sixth Satire of the first book. His health was indifferent, as before observed. His eyes in particular troubled him. He speaks of himself as grey before his time. Suetonius says he was short and fat, and he describes himself good humouredly as a fit sample of a hog from Epicurus' sty (Epp. i. 4. 16). Augustus rallies him on his stature, in a letter of which part is given in Suetonius' life of Horace.

The life of Horace was written by Porphyrion, the Scholiast frequently referred to in these notes. He mentions that memoir himself: "Patre libertino atum esse Horatium et in narratione quam de vita

ipsius habui ostendi" (on S. i. 6. 41). The same Scholiast refers more than once to books that had been written on the persons mentioned by Horace. A reference to Estré's work spoken of in the Preface will show that a catalogue of these persons embraces nearly all the distinguished men of the day, with most of whom Horace was on friendly

terms.

The Metres adopted by Horace from the Greek⚫ are thirteen in number in the Odes, and six in the Epodes. I purpose saying only a few words on each.

C. i. 1. The metre of this Ode is one of three, called after Asclepiades, a lyric poet of uncertain date. It consists of single lines divided thus:

The caesura usually falls on the long syllable after the end of the second foot. There are two exceptions only in Horace, ii. 12. 25, and iv. 8. 17. The Greeks did not follow this rule, and their lines were less monotonous in consequence. The division of this metre by choriambi is against the obvious rhythm. C. iii. 30, iv. 8, belong to the same.

C. i. 2.-This metre takes its name from Sappho. It consists of stanzas of four verses each. The first three are alike, and consist of four trochees, with a dactyl in the third place. Horace always substitutes a spondee for the second trochee, with one uncertain exception, C. S. 70. The fourth verse consists of a dactyl and spondee, and is named an Adonic.

This is one of the commonest metres. It differs in Horace's hands from the Greek usage by the less frequent introduction of the trochee in the second place, and from the caesura usually falling after the fifth syllable. This arrangement takes away a good deal from the vigour of the metre, a defect which Horace seems to have perceived when he wrote the Carmen Saeculare and the Sapphic Odes of the fourth book'.

I subjoin some remarks from the "Journal of Education," 1832 (vol. iv. p. 356), on Dr. Carey's “Latin Prosody made Easy." The author observes: "It greatly conduces to the harmony of the Sapphic verse to make the caesura at the fifth semifoot, as Dive, quem proles Niobea magnae;' not as 'Haec Jovem sentire Deosque cunctos,' -a very common opinion. To which the reviewer replies: "To our ears the latter is at least as melodious as the former, consisting of a dactyl interposed between two accentual ditrochees, as in the lines quoted by Dr. Carey from Catullus and Sappho :

• ποικιλόθρον ἀθάνατ ̓ Αφροδίτα.
'Pauca nuntiate meae puellae;'

C. i. 3. This is another of the Asclepiadean metres, consisting of two verses alternating thus:

-xl-uul-u=

__|_~~|_||-uul-us

The first of these verses is called after Glycon, a poet whose age and birthplace are unknown. The second verse is the same as C. i. 1. To this metre also belong C. i. 13. 19. 36; iii. 9. 15. 19. 24, 25. 28; iv. 1. 3.

C. i. 4.—This metre has its name from Archilochus of Paros. It consists of alternate verses, of which the first is one of those that the grammarians call ȧσváρτητо, because they consist of different measures which do not blend together. The first four feet are those of an hexameter verse, after which follow three trochees, the first part being always distinct from the second. The second is a catalectic iambic trimeter, that is, it has one syllable wanting in the last foot. There is no other Ode in this metre.

C. i. 5. This is also reckoned with the Asclepiadean metres, though only the two first lines have their name from Asclepiades, being the same as C. 1. The third is called after Pherecrates, the comic poet of Athens. It consists of a dactyl between two spondees, if my ear does not deceive me; but it is usual to mark it with a spondee, choriambus, and long syllable. The fourth is the Glyconean verse, which occurs in C. 3. To this metre belong C. i. 14, 21, 23; iii. 7, 13; iv. 13.

and perhaps in the line of Horace :

'Quindecim Diana preces virorum.'

If Horace has generally avoided this form of the verse, the dislike seems to have been diminished as his ear improved; so that while there is but one instance of such a caesura in the second book of the Carmina, and not one in the third, there are no less than twenty-two in the fourth, and in the Carm. Saec. one on an average in every stanza. Nay, even in such lines as Doctus et Phoebi chorus et Dianae' we prefer the double trochee accent at the commencement to that which Dr. Carey considers so sweet, who virtually makes 'chorus' a trochee, and would, we suppose, give the sound of a dactyl to Romulae in Romulae genti date remque prolem | que Et decus omne.' If any one will read over the C. S. with the accent we contend for, he will readily perceive the beauty of the metre, and cease to wonder that Sappho and Catullus hesitated not to make the fourth syllable short. In particular much beauty will be added to the line 'Jam Fides et Pax et Honos Pudorque.' According to Dr. Carey's notion of a metrical accent, 'Pax' will lose all emphasis."

8 πρῶτος ἀσυναρτήτοις ̓Αρχίλοχος κέχρηται (Hephaestion, p. 48, ap. Bentley on Epod. ii.). The Scholiast on Hephaestion, p. 52, says there were no less than sixty-four metres of this sort used by the Greeks.