Horace and His Influence

by Grant Showerman

II. HORACE THROUGH THE AGES

Introductory

Thus much we have had to say in the interpretation of Horace. Our interpretation has centered about his qualities as a person: his broad experience, his sensitiveness, his responsiveness, his powers of assimilation, his gift of expression, his concreteness as a representative of the world of culture, as a son of Italy, as a citizen of eternal Rome, as a member of the universal human family.

Let us now tell the story of Horace in the life of after times. It will include an account of the esteem in which he was held while still in the flesh; of the fame he enjoyed and the influence he exercised until Rome as a great empire was no more and the Roman tongue and Roman spirit alike were decayed; of the way in which his works were preserved intact through obscure centuries of ignorance and turmoil; and of their second birth when men began to delight once more in the luxuries of the mind. This will prepare the way for a final chapter, on the peculiar quality and manner of the Horatian influence.

1. Horace the Prophet

Horace is aware of his qualities as a poet. In an interesting blend, of which the first and larger part is detached and judicial estimation of his work, a second part literary convention, and the third and least a smiling and inoffensive self-assertion, he prophesies his own immortality.

From infancy he has been set apart as the child of the Muses. At birth Melpomene marked him for her own. The doves of ancient story covered him over with the green leaves of the Apulian wood as, lost and overcome by weariness, he lay in peaceful slumber, and kept him safe from creeping and four-footed things, a babe secure in the favor of heaven. The sacred charm that rests upon him preserved him in the rout at Philippi, rescued him from the Sabine wolf, saved him from death by the falling tree and the waters of shipwreck. He will abide under its shadow wherever he may go,—to his favorite haunts in Latium, to the far north where fierce Britons offer up the stranger to their gods, to the far east and the blazing sands of the Syrian desert, to rude Spain and the streams of Scythia, to the treeless, naked fields of the frozen pole, to homeless lands under the fiery car of the too-near sun. He will rise superior to the envy of men. The pinions that bear him aloft through the clear ether will be of no usual or flagging sort. For him there shall be no death, no Stygian wave across which none returns:

Forego the dirge; let no one raise the cry,

Or make unseemly show of grief and gloom,

Nor think o'er me, who shall not really die,

To rear the empty honor of the tomb.

His real self will remain among men, ever springing afresh in their words of praise:

Not lasting bronze nor pyramid upreared

By princes shall outlive my powerful rhyme.

The monument I build, to men endeared,

Not biting rain, nor raging wind, nor time,

Endlessly flowing through the countless years,

Shall e'er destroy. I shall not wholly die;

The grave shall have of me but what appears;

For me fresh praise shall ever multiply.

As long as priest and silent Vestal wind

The Capitolian steep, tongues shall tell o'er

How humble Horace rose above his kind

Where Aufidus's rushing waters roar

In the parched land where rustic Daunus reigned,

And first taught Grecian numbers how to run

In Latin measure. Muse! the honor gained

Is thine, for I am thine till time is done.

Gracious Melpomene, O hear me now,

And with the Delphic bay gird round my brow.

Yet Horace does not always refer to his poetry in this serious vein; if indeed we are to call serious a manner of literary prophecy which has always been more or less conventional. His frequent disclaimers of the higher inspiration are well known. The Muse forbids him to attempt the epic strain or the praise of Augustus and Agrippa. In the face of grand themes like these, his genius is slight. He will not essay even the strain of Simonides in the lament for an Empire stained by land and sea with the blood of fratricidal war. His themes shall be rather the feast and the mimic battles of revelling youths and maidens, the making of love in the grots of Venus. His lyre shall be jocose, his plectrum of the lighter sort.

He not only half-humorously disclaims the capacity for lofty themes, but, especially as he grows older and more philosophic, and perhaps less lyric, half-seriously attributes whatever he does to persevering effort. He has

"Nor the pride nor ample pinion

That the Theban eagle bear,

Sailing with supreme dominion

Through the azure deep of air;"

he is the bee, with infinite industry flitting from flower to flower, the unpretending maker of verse, fashioning his songs with only toil and patience. He believes in the file, in long delay before giving forth to the world the poem that henceforth can never be recalled. The only inspiration he claims for Satire and Epistle, which, he says, approximate the style of spoken discourse, lies in the aptness and patience with which he fashions his verses from language in ordinary use, giving to words new dignity by means of skillful combination. Let anyone who wishes to be convinced undertake to do the same; he will find himself perspiring in a vain attempt.

And if Horace did not always conceive of his inspiration as purely ethereal, neither did he always dream of the path to immortality as leading through the spacious reaches of the upper air. At forty-four, he is already aware of a more pedestrian path. He has observed the ways of the public with literature, as any writer must observe them still, and knows also of a certain use to which his poems are being put. Perhaps with some secret pride, but surely with a philosophic resignation that is like good-humored despair, he sees that the path is pedagogical. In reproachful tones, he addresses the book of Epistles that is so eager to try its fortune in the big world: But if the prophet is not blinded by disgust at your foolishness, you will be prized at Rome until the charm of youth has left you. Then, soiled and worn by much handling of the common crowd, you will either silently give food to vandal worms, or seek exile in Utica, or be tied up and sent to Ilerda. The monitor you did not heed will laugh, like the man who sent his balky ass headlong over the cliff; for who would trouble to save anyone against his will? This lot, too, you may expect: for a stammering old age to come upon you teaching children to read in the out-of-the-way parts of town.

2. Horace and Ancient Rome

That Horace refers to being pointed out by the passer-by as the minstrel of the Roman lyre, or, in other words, as the laureate, that his satire provokes sufficient criticism to draw from him a defense and a justification of himself against the charge of cynicism, and that he finally records a greater freedom from the tooth of envy, are all indications of the prominence to which he rose. That Virgil and Varius, poets of recognized worth, and their friend Plotius Tucca, third of the whitest souls of earth, introduced him to the attention of Maecenas, and that the discriminating lover of excellence became his patron and made him known to Augustus, are evidences of the appeal of which he was capable both as poet and man. In the many names of worthy and distinguished men of letters and affairs to whom he addresses the individual poems, and with whom he must therefore have been on terms of mutual respect, is seen a further proof. Even Virgil contains passages disclosing a more than ordinary familiarity with Horace's work, and men like Ovid and Propertius, of whose personal relations with Horace nothing is known, not only knew but absorbed his poems.

If still further evidence of Horace's worth is required, it may be seen in his being invited to commemorate the exploits of Drusus and Tiberius, the royal stepsons, against the hordes of the North, and the greatness of Augustus himself, ever-present help of Italy, and imperial Rome; and in the Emperor's expression of disappointment, sometime before the second book of Epistles was published, that he had been mentioned in none of the "Talks." And, finally, if there remained in the minds of his generation any shadow of doubt as to the esteem in which he was held by the foremost men in the State, who were in most cases men of letters as well as patrons of letters, it was dispelled when, in the year 17, Horace was chosen to write the Secular Hymn, for use in the greatest religious and patriotic festival of the times.

These facts receive greater significance from an appreciation of the poet's sincerity and independence. He will restore to Maecenas his gifts, if their possession is to mean a curb upon the freedom of living his nature calls for. He declines a secretaryship to the Emperor himself, and without offense to his imperial friend, who bids him be free of his house as if it were his own.

But Horace must submit also to the more impartial judgment of time. Of the two innovations which gave him relief against the general background, one was the amplification of the crude but vigorous satire of Lucilius into a more perfect literary character, and the other was the persuasion of the Greek lyric forms into Roman service. Both examples had their important effects within the hundred years that followed on Horace's death.

The satire and epistle, which Horace hardly distinguished, giving to both the name of Sermo, or "Talk," was the easier to imitate. Persius, dying in the year 62, at the age of twenty-eight, was steeped in Horace, but lacked the gentle spirit, the genial humor, and the suavity of expression that make Horatian satire a delight. In Juvenal, writing under Trajan and Hadrian, the tendency of satire toward consistent aggressiveness which is present in Horace and further advanced in Persius, has reached its goal. With Juvenal, satire is a matter of the lash, of vicious cut and thrust. Juvenal may tell the truth, but the smiling face of Horatian satire has disappeared. With him the line of Roman satire is extinct, but the nature of satire for all time to come is fixed. Juvenal, employing the form of Horace and substituting for his content of mellow contentment and good humor the bitterness of an outraged moral sense, is the last Roman and the first modern satirist.

The Odes found more to imitate them, but none to rival. The most pronounced example of their influence is found in the choruses of the tragic poet Seneca, where form and substance alike are constantly reminiscent of Horace. Two comments on the Odes from the second half of the first century are of even greater eloquence than Seneca's example as testimonials to the impression made by the Horatian lyric. Petronius, of Nero's time, speaks of the poet's curiosa felicitas, meaning the gift of arriving, by long and careful search, at the inevitable word or phrase. Quintilian, writing his treatise on Instruction, sums him up thus: "Of our lyric poets, Horace is about the only one worth reading; for he sometimes reaches real heights, and he is at the same time full of delightfulness and grace, and both in variety of imagery and in words is most happily daring." To these broad strokes the modern critic has added little except by way of elaboration.

The Life of Horace, written by Suetonius, the secretary of Hadrian, contains evidence of another, and perhaps a stronger, character regarding the poet's power. We see that doubtful imitations are beginning to circulate. "I possess," says the imperial secretary, "some elegies attributed to his pen, and a letter in prose, supposed to be a recommendation of himself to Maecenas, but I think that both are spurious; for the elegies are commonplace, and the letter is, besides, obscure, which was by no means one of his faults."

The history of Roman literature from the end of the first century after Christ is the story of the decline of inspiration, the decline of taste, the decline of language, the decline of intellectual interest. Beneath it all and through it all there is spreading, gradually and silently, the insidious decay that will surely crumble the constitution of the ancient world. Pagan letters are uncreative, and, with few exceptions, without imagination and dull. The literature of the new religion, beginning to push green shoots from the ruins of the times, is a mingling of old and new substance under forms that are always old.

In the main, neither Christian nor pagan will be attracted by Horace. The Christian will see in his gracious resignation only the philosophy of despair, and in his light humors only careless indulgence in the vanities of this world and blindness to the eternal concerns of life. The pagan will not appreciate the delicacy of his art, and will find the abundance of his literary, mythological, historical, and geographical allusion, the compactness of his expression, and the maturity and depth of his intellect, a barrier calling for too much effort. Both will prefer Virgil—Virgil of "arms and the man," the story-teller, Virgil the lover of Italy, Virgil the glorifier of Roman deeds and destiny, Virgil the readily understood, Virgil who has already drawn aside, at least partly, the veil that hangs before the mystic other-world, Virgil the almost Christian prophet, with the almost Biblical language, Virgil the spiritual, Virgil the comforter.

Horace will not be popular. He will remain the poet of the few who enjoy the process of thinking and recognize the charm of skillful expression. Tacitus and Juvenal esteem him, the Emperor Alexander Severus reads him in leisure hours, the long list of mediocrities representing the course of literary history demonstrate by their content that the education of men of letters in general includes a knowledge of him. The greatest of the late pagans,—Ausonius and Claudian at the end of the fourth century; Boëthius, philosopher-victim of Theodoric in the early sixth; Cassiodorus, the chronicler, imperial functionary in the same century,—disclose a familiarity whose foundations are to be looked for in love and enthusiasm rather than in mere cultivation. It may be safely assumed that, in general, appreciation of Horace was proportionate to greatness of soul and real love of literature.

The same assumption may be made in the realm of Christian literature. Minucius Felix, calmly and logically arguing the case of Christianity against paganism, Tertullian the fiery preacher, Cyprian the enthusiast and martyr, Arnobius the rhetorical, contain no indications of familiarity with Horace, though this is not conclusive proof that they did not know and admire him; but Lactantius, the Christian Cicero, Jerome, the sympathetic, the sensitive, the intense, the irascible, Prudentius, the most original and the most vigorous of the Christian poets, and even Venantius Fortunatus, bishop and traveler in the late sixth century, and last of the Christian poets while Latin was still a native tongue, display a knowledge of Horace which argues also a love for him.

The name of Venantius Fortunatus brings us to the very brink of the centuries called the Middle Age. If there are those who object to the name of Dark Age as doing injustice to the life of the times, they must at any rate agree that for Horace it was really dark. That his light was not totally lost in the shadows which enveloped the art of letters was due to one aspect of his immortality which we must notice before leaving the era of ancient Rome.

Thus far, in accounting for Horace's continued fame, we have considered only his appeal to the individual intellect and taste, the admiration which represented an interest spontaneous and sincere. There was another phase of his fame which expressed an interest less inspired, though its first cause was none the less in the enthusiasm of the elect. It was the phase foreseen by Horace himself, and its first manifestations had probably appeared in his own life-time. It was the immortality of the text-book and the commentary.

Quintilian's estimate of Horace in the Institutes is an indication that the poet was already a subject of school instruction in the latter half of the first century. Juvenal, in the first quarter of the next, gives us a chiaroscuro glimpse into a Roman school-interior where little boys are sitting at their desks in early morning, each with odorous lamp shining upon school editions of Horace and Virgil smudged and discolored by soot from the wicks,

totidem olfecisse lucernas,

Quot stabant pueri, cum totus decolor esset

Flaccus et haereret nigro fuligo Maroni.

(VII. 225 ff.)

The use of the poet in the schools meant that lovers of learning as well as lovers of literary art were occupying themselves with Horace. The first critical edition of his works, by Marcus Valerius Probus, appeared as early as the time of Nero. A native of Berytus, the modern Beirut, disappointed in the military career, he turned to the collection, study, and critical editing of Latin authors, among whom, besides Horace, were Virgil, Lucretius, Persius, and Terence. His method, comprising careful comparison of manuscripts, emendations, and punctuation, with annotations explanatory and aesthetic, all prefaced by the author's biography, won him the reputation of the most erudite of Roman men of letters. It is in no small measure due to him that the tradition of Horace's text is so comparatively good.

There were many other critics and interpreters of Horace. Of many of them, the names as well as the works have been lost. Modestus and Claranus, perhaps not long after Probus, are two names that survive. Suetonius, as we have seen, wrote the poet's Life, though it contains almost nothing not found in the works of Horace themselves. In the time of Hadrian appeared also the edition of Quintus Terentius Scaurus, in ten books, of which the Odes and Epodes made five, and the Satires and Epistles five, the Ars Poetica being set apart as a book in itself. At the end of the second or the beginning of the third century, Helenius Acro wrote commentaries on certain plays of Terence and on Horace, giving special attention to the persons appearing in the poet's pages, a favorite subject on which a considerable body of writing sprang up. Not long afterward appeared the commentary of Pomponius Porphyrio, originally published with the text of Horace, but later separately. In spite of modifications wrought in the course of time, only Porphyrio's, of all the commentaries of the first three hundred years, has preserved an approximation to its original character and quantity. Acro's has been overlaid by other commentators until the identity of his work is lost. The purpose of Porphyrio was to bring poetic beauty into relief by clarifying construction and sense, rather than to engage in learned exposition of the subject matter.

Finally, in the year 527, the consul Vettius Agorius Basilius Mavortius, with the collaboration of one Felix, revised the text of at least the Odes and Epodes, and perhaps also of the Satires and Epistles. That there were many other editions intervening between Porphyrio's and his, there can be little doubt.

This review of scant and scattered, but consistent, evidence is proof enough of Horace's hold upon the intellectual and literary leaders of the ancient Roman world. For the individual pagan who clung to the old order, he represented more acceptably than anyone else, or anyone else but Virgil, the ideal of a glorious past, and afforded consequently something of inspiration for the decaying present. Upon men who, whether pagan or Christian, were possessed by literary enthusiasms, and upon men who delighted in contemplation of the human kind, he cast the spell of art and humanity. Those who caught the fire directly may indeed have been few, but they were men of parts whose fire was communicated.

As for the influence exercised by Horace upon Roman society at large through generation after generation of schoolboys as the centuries passed, its depth and breadth cannot be measured. It may be partly appreciated, however, by those who realize from their own experience both as pupils and teachers the effect upon growing and impressionable minds of a literature rich in morality and patriotism, and who reflect upon the greater amplitude of literary instruction among the ancients, by whom a Homer, a Virgil, or a Horace was made the vehicle of discipline so broad and varied as to be an education in itself.

3. Horace and the Middle Age

There is no such thing as a line marking definitely the time when ancient Rome ceased to be itself and became the Rome of the Middle Age. If there were such a line, we should probably have crossed it already, whether in recording the last real Roman setting of the Horatian house in order by Mavortius in 527, or in referring to Venantius Fortunatus, the last of the Latin Christian poets. The usual date marking the end of the Western Empire, 476, is only the convenient sign for the culmination of the movement long since begun in the interferences of an army composed more and more of a non-Italian, Northern soldiery, and ending in a final mutiny or revolt which assumed the character of invasion and the permanent seizure of civil as well as military authority. The coming of Odoacer is the ultimate stage in the process of Roman and Italian exhaustion, the sign that life is not longer possible except through infusion of northern blood.

The military and political change itself was only exterior, the outward demonstration of deep-seated maladies. The too-successful bureaucratization of Augustus and such of his successors as were really able and virtuous, the development of authority into tyranny by such as were neither able nor virtuous, but mad and wilful, had removed from Roman citizenship the responsibility which in the olden time had made it strong; and the increase of taxes, assessments, and compulsory honors involving personal contribution, had substituted for responsibility and privilege a burden so heavy that under it the civic life of the Empire was crushed to extinction. In Italy, above all, the ancient seed was running out. Under the influence of economic and social movement, the old stock had died and disappeared, or changed beyond recognition. The old language, except in the mouths and from the pens of the few, was fast losing its identity. Uncertainty, indifference, stagnation, weariness of body, mind, and soul, leaden resignation and despair, forgetfulness of the glories of the past in art and even in heroism, were the inheritance of the last generations of the old order. Jerome felt barbarism closing in: Romanus orbis ruit, he says,—the Roman world is tumbling in ruins.

In measure as the vitality of pagan Rome was sapped, into the inert and decaying mass there penetrated gradually the two new life-currents of a new religion and a new blood. The change they wrought from the first century to the descent of the Northerners was not sudden, nor was it rapid. Nor was it always a change that carried visible warrant of virtue. The mingling of external races in the army and in trade, the interference of a Northern soldiery in the affairs of the throne, the more peaceful but more intimate shuffling of the population through the social and economic emergence of the one-time nameless and poor, whether of native origin or foreign, may have contributed fresh blood to an anaemic society, but the result most apparent to the eye and most disturbing to the soul was the debasement of standards and the fears that naturally come with violent, sudden, or merely unfamiliar change. The new religion may have contributed new hope and erected new standards, but it also contributed exaggerations, contradictions, and new uncertainties. The life of logic began to be displaced by the life of feeling.

The change and turmoil of the times that attended and followed the crumbling of the Roman world were favorable neither to the production of letters nor to the enjoyment of a literary heritage. Goth, Byzantine, Lombard, Frank, German, Saracen, and Norman made free of the soil of Italy. If men were not without leisure, they were without the leisure of peaceful and careful contemplation, and lacked the buoyant heart without which assimilation of art is hardly less possible than creation. Ignorance had descended upon the world, and gross darkness covered the people. The classical authors were solid, the meat of vigorous minds. Their language, never the facile language of the people and the partially disciplined, now became a resisting medium that was foreign to the general run of men. Their syntax was archaic and crabbed, their metres forgotten. Their substance, never grasped without effort, was now not only difficult, but became the abstruse matter of another people and another age. To all but the cultivated few, they were known for anything but what they really were. It was an age of Virgil the mysterious prophet of the coming of Christ, of Virgil the necromancer. Real knowledge withdrew to secret and secluded refuges.

If the classical authors in general were beyond the powers and outside the affection of men, Horace was especially so. More intellectual than Virgil, and less emotional, in metrical forms for the most part lost to their knowledge and liking, the poet of the individual heart rather than of men in the national or racial mass, the poet strictly of this world and in no respect of the next, he almost vanished from the life of men.

Yet the classics were not all lost, and not even Horace perished. Strange to say, and yet not really strange, the most potent active influence in the destruction of his appeal to men was also the most effective instrument of his preservation. Through the darkness and the storms of the nine hundred years following the fall of the Western Empire, Horace was sheltered under the wing of the Church.

It was a natural exaggeration for Christianity to begin by teaching absolute separation from the world, and to declare, through the mouths of such as Tertullian, that the blood of Christ alone sufficed and nothing more was needed, and that literature and all the other arts of paganism, together with its manners, were so inseparable from its religion that every part was anathema. It was natural that Horace, more than Virgil, should be the object of its neglect, and even of its active enmity. Horace is the most completely pagan of poets whose works are of spiritual import. The only immortality of which he takes account is the immortality of fame. Aside from this, the end of man is dust and shadow.

It is true that in the depth of his heart he does not feel with Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius that "Dust thou art, to dust returnest" is spoken of soul as well as body. The old Roman instinct for ancestor-communion is too strong in him for that. But he acquiesces in their doctrine in so far as shadowy existence in another world inspires in him no pleasing hope. He displays no trace of the faith in the supernatural which accompanies the Christian hope of happy immortality. He contains none of the expressions of yearning for communion with the divine, of self-abasement in the presence of the eternal, which belong to Christian poetry. The flights of his muse rarely take him into the realm of a divine love and providence. His aspirations are for things achievable in this world: for faithfulness in friendship, for enduring courage, for irreproachable patriotism,—in short, for ideal human relations.

Horace's idealism is not Christian idealism, and is only in a limited way even spiritual idealism. When he prays, it is likely to be for others rather than himself, and for temporal blessings only: for the success of Augustus at home and in the field, for prolongation of Maecenas' life and happiness, for the weal of the State, for the nurslings of his little flock, for health of body and contentment of heart. His dwelling is not in the secret place of the Most High. Philosophy, not religion, is his refuge and his fortress. In philosophy, not in God, will he trust.

In a word, Horace is logical, self-reliant, and self-sufficient. He sees no happy future after this life, is conscious of no providence watching over him, is involved in no obligation to the beings of an eternal world. He looks this world and the next, gods and men, directly in the face, and expects other men to do the same. Life and its duties are for him clear-cut. He is no propounder of problems, no searcher after hidden purposes. He lacks almost absolutely the feverish aspiration and unrest which characterize Christian and other humanitarian modes of thought and sentiment, and whose manifestation is one of the best known features of recent modern times, as it was of the earliest Christian experience.

But Christianity was a religion of men, and therefore human. If its exaggerations were natural, its reservations and its reactions were also natural. There were men whose admiration continued to be roused and whose affections continued to be touched by Virgil and Horace. There were men whose reason as well as whose instinct impelled them to employ the classic authors and the classic arts in the service of the new religion. Christianity possessed no distinct and separate media of expression and no separate body of knowledge which could bear fruit as matter of instruction. Pagan art and literature were indispensable whether for the study of history or of mere humanity. Christianity was therefore compelled to employ the old forms of art, which involved the use of the old instrumentalities of literary education. When, finally, paganism had fallen under its repeated assaults, what had been forced use became a matter of choice, and the classics were taken under the Church's protection and marked with her approval.

The data regarding Horace in the Middle Age are few, but they are clear. We need not examine them all in order to draw conclusions.

The monastic idea, of eastern origin and given currency in the West by Jerome, was first reduced to systematic practice by Benedict, who created the first Rule at Monte Cassino about the time of the Mavortian recension of Horace, in 527. New moral strength issued from the cloisters now rapidly established. Cassiodorus, especially active in promoting the spiritual phase of monkish retreat, made the intellectual life also his concern. Monte Cassino, between Naples and Rome, and Bobbio, in the northern part of the peninsula, were the great Italian centers. The Benedictine influence spread to Ireland, which before the end of the sixth century became a stronghold of the movement and an inspiration to England, Germany, France, and even Italy, where Bobbio itself was founded by Columban and his companions. St. Gall in Switzerland, Fulda at Hersfeld in Hesse-Nassau, Corvey in Saxony, Iona in Scotland, Tours in France, Reichenau on Lake Constance, were all active centers of religion and learning within two hundred years from Benedict's death.

The monasteries not only afforded the spiritual enthusiast the opportunity of separation from the world of temptation and storm, but were equally inviting to men devoted first of all to the intellectual life. The scholar and the educator found within their walls not only peaceful escape from the harshnesses of political change and military broil, but the opportunity to labor usefully and unmolested in the occupation that pleased them most. The cloister became a Christian institute. The example of Cassiodorus was followed two hundred years later on a larger scale by Charlemagne. Schools were founded both in cloister and at court, scholars summoned, manuscripts copied, the life of pagan antiquity studied, and the bond between the languages and cultures of present and past made firmer. The schools of the old régime had fallen away in the sixth century, when Northern rule had closed the civic career to natives of Italy. A great advance in the intellectual life now laid the foundations of all cultural effort in the Middle Age.

No small part of this advance was due to the preservation of manuscripts by copying. In this activity France was first, so far as Horace was concerned. The copies by the scribes of Charlemagne went back to Mavortius and Porphyrio, the originals of which were probably discovered at Bobbio by his scholars. Of the two hundred and fifty manuscripts in existence, the greater part are French in origin, the oldest being the Bernensis, of the ninth or tenth century, from near Orléans. Germany was a worthy second to France. The finds in monastery libraries of both countries in the humanist movement of the fifteenth century were especially rich. Italy, on the contrary, preserved few manuscripts of her poet, and none that is really ancient. Italy began the great monastery movement, but disorder and change were against the diffusion of culture. Charlemagne's efforts probably had little to do with Italy. The Church seems to have had no care to preserve the ancient culture of her native land.

What this meant in terms of actual acquaintance with the poet would not be clear without evidence of other kinds. By the end of the sixth century, knowledge of Horace was already vague. He was not read in Africa, Spain, or Gaul. Read in Italy up to Charlemagne's time, a hundred years later his works are not to be found in the catalogue of Bobbio, one of the greatest seats of learning. What the general attitude of the Church's leadership toward him was, may be conjectured from the declaration of Gregory the Great against all beauty in writing. Its general capacity for Horace may perhaps be surmised also from the confession of the Pope's contemporary, Gregory of Tours, that he is unfamiliar with the ancient literary languages. The few readers of the late Empire had become fewer still. The difficult form and matter of the Odes, and their unadaptability to religious and moral use, disqualified them for the approval of all but the individual scholar or literary enthusiast. The moralities of the Epistles were more tractable, and formed the largest contribution to the Florilegia, or flower-collections, that were circulated by themselves. Horace did not contain the facile and stimulating tales of Ovid, he was not a Virgil the story-teller and almost Christian, his lines did not exercise a strong appeal to the ear, he was not an example of the rhetorical, like Lucan, his satire did not lend itself, like a Juvenal's, to universal condemnation of paganism.

In the eighth century, Columban knows Horace, the Venerable Bede cites him four times, and Alcuin is called a Flaccus. The York catalogue of Alcuin shows the presence of most of the classic authors. Paul the Deacon, who wrote a poem in the Sapphics he learned from Horace, is declared, he says, to be like Homer, Flaccus, and Virgil, but ungratefully and ungraciously adds, "men like that I'll compare with dogs." In Spain, Saint Isidore of Seville knew Horace in the seventh century, though the Rule of Isidore, as of some other monastic legislators, forbade the use of pagan authors without special permission; yet the coming of the Arabs in the eighth century, and the struggle between the Gothic, Christian, and Islamic civilizations resulted, for the next six or seven centuries, in what seems total oblivion of the poet.

In the ninth and tenth centuries, under the impulse of the Carolingian favor, France, in which there is heretofore no evidence of Horace's presence from the end of Roman times, becomes the greatest center of manuscript activity, the Bernensis and six Parisian exemplars dating from this period. Yet the indexes of St. Gall, Reichenau, and Bobbio contain the name of no work of Horace, and only Nevers and Loesch contained his complete works. The Ecbasis Captivi, an animal-epic appearing at Toul in 940, has one fifth of its verses formed out of Horace in the manner of the cento, or patchwork. At about the same time, the famous Hrosvitha of Gandersheim writes her six Christian dramas patterned after Terence, and in them uses Horace. Mention by Walter of Speyer, and interest shown by the active monastery on the Tegernsee, are of the same period. The tenth century is sometimes spoken of as the Latin Renaissance under the Ottos, the first of whom, called the Great, crowned Emperor at Rome in 962, welcomed scholars at his court and made every effort to promote learning.

The momentum of intellectual interest is not lost in the eleventh century. Paris becomes its most ardent center, with Reims, Orléans, and Fleury also of note. The Codex Parisinus belongs to this period. German activity, too, is at its height, especially in the education of boys for the church. Italy affords one catalogue mention, of a Horace copied under Desiderius. Peter Damian was its man of greatest learning, but the times were intellectually stagnant. The popes were occupied by rivalry with the emperors. It was the century of Gregory the Seventh and Canossa.

In the twelfth century came the struggle of the Hohenstaufen with the Italian cities, and the disorder and turmoil of the rise of the communes and the division of Italy. One catalogue shows a Horace, and one manuscript dates from the time. England and France are united by the Norman Conquest in much the same way as Germany and France had been associated in the kingdom of Charlemagne. It is the century of Roger Bacon. Especially in Germany, England, and France, it is the age of the Crusades and the knightly orders. It is an age of the spread of culture among the common people. In France, it is the age of the monastery of Cluny, and the age of Abelard. Education and travel became the mode. In general, acquaintance with Horace among cultivated men may now be taken for granted. The Epistles and Satires find more favor than the Odes. Five hundred and twenty citations of the former and seventy-seven of the latter have been collected for the twelfth century.

The thirteenth century marks a decline in the intellectual life. The Crusades exhaust the energies of the time, and detract from its literary interest. The German rulers and the Italian ecclesiasts are absorbed in the struggle for supremacy between pope and emperor. Scholasticism overshadows humanism. The humanistic tradition of Charlemagne has died out, and the intellectual ideal is represented by Vincent of Beauvais and the Speculum Historiale. There is no mention of Horace in the catalogues of Italy. The manuscripts of France are careless, the comments and glosses poor. The decline will continue until arrested by the Renaissance.

It must not be forgotten that among all these scattered and flickering attentions to Horace there was the constant nucleus of instruction in the school. That he was used for this purpose first in the Carolingian cloister-schools, and later in the secular schools which grew to independent existence as a result of the vigorous spread of educational spirit, cannot be doubtful. Gerbert, dying at the beginning of the eleventh century as Pope Sylvester II, is known to have interpreted Horace in his school. This is the oldest direct evidence of the scholastic use of Horace, but other proofs are to be seen in the commentaries of the medieval period, all of which are of a kind suitable for school use, and in the marginal annotations, often in the native tongue.

The decline of humane studies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries meant also the decline of interest in Horace, who had always been above all the poet of the cultivated few. At the beginning of the thirteenth century in Italy, nowhere but at Bologna and Rome was Latin taught except as the elementary instruction necessary to the study of civil and canonical law. Gaufried of Vinesaux, coming from England to Italy, and composing an Ars Dictaminis and a Poietria Nova containing Horatian reminiscences, is one of two or three significant examples of Latin teachers who concerned themselves with literature as well as language. Coluccio Salutati, wanting to buy a copy of Horace in 1370, is apparently unable to find it. The decline of interest in Horace will be arrested only by the Rebirth of Learning.

The intellectual movement back to the classical authors and the classical civilizations is well called the Rebirth. The brilliance of the new era as compared with the thousand years that lead to it from the most high and palmiest days of Rome is such as to dim almost to darkness the brightest days of medieval culture. The new life into which Horace is now to enter will be so spirited and full that the old life, though by no means devoid of active influence in society at large and in the individual soul, will seem indeed like a long death and a waiting for the resurrection into a new heaven and a new earth.

4. Horace and Modern Times

THE REBIRTH OF HORACE

The national character of the Aeneid gave Virgil a greater appeal than Horace in ancient Roman times. In the Middle Age, his qualities as story-teller and poet of the compassionate heart, together with his fame as necromancer and prophet, made still more pronounced the favor in which he was held. The ignorance of the earlier centuries of the period could not appreciate Horace the logical, the intellectual, the difficult, while the schematized religion and knowledge of the later were not attracted by Horace the philosophical and individual.

With the Renaissance and its quickening of intellectual life in general, and in particular the value it set upon personality and individualism, the positions of the poets were reversed. For four hundred years now it can hardly be denied that Horace rather than Virgil has been the representative Latin poet of humanism.

This is not to say that Horace is greater than Virgil, or that he is as great. Virgil is still the poet of stately movement and golden narrative, the poet of the grand style. Owing to the greater facility with which he may be read, he is also still the poet of the young and of greater numbers. With the coming of the new era he did not lose in the esteem that is based upon the appreciation of literary art, but rather gained.

It will be better to say that Horace finally came more fully into his own. This was not because he changed. He did not change. The times changed. The barriers of intellectual sloth and artificiality fell away, and men became accessible to him. Virgil lost nothing of his old-time appeal to the fancy and to the ear, but Horace's virtues also were discovered: his distinction in word and phrase, his understanding of the human heart. Virgil lost nothing of his charm for youth and age, but Horace was discovered as the poet of the riper and more thoughtful mind. Virgil remained the admired, but Horace became the friend. Virgil remained the guide, but Horace became the companion. "Virgil," says Oliver Wendell Holmes, "has been the object of an adoration amounting almost to worship, but he will often be found on the shelf, while Horace lies on the student's table, next his hand."

The nature and extent of Horace's influence upon modern letters and life will be best brought into relief by a brief historical review. It is not necessary to this purpose, nor would it be possible, within ordinary limits, to enter into a detailed account. It will be appropriate to begin with Italy.

i. IN ITALY

Horace did not spring immediately into prominence with the coming of the Renaissance, whether elsewhere or in Italy. As might be expected, the essentially epic and medieval Dante found inspiration in Virgil rather than in Horace, though the Ars Poetica was known to him and quoted more than once as authority on style. "This is what our master Horace teaches," runs one of the passages, "when at the beginning of Poetry he says, 'Choose a subject, etc.'" The imperfect idea of Horace formed in Dante's mind is indicated by the one verse in the Divina Commedia which refers to him:

L' altro è Orazio satiro che viene,—

The other coming is Horace the satirist.

With Petrarch, the first great figure to emerge from the obscure vistas of medievalism, the case was different. The first modern who really understood the classics understood Horace also, and did him greater justice than fell to his lot again for many generations. The copy of Horace's works which he acquired on November 28, 1347, remained by him until on the 18th of July in 1374 the venerable poet and scholar was found dead at the age of seventy among his books. Fond as he was of Virgil, Cicero, and Seneca, he had an intimate and affectionate knowledge of Horace, to whom there are references in all his works, and from whom he enriched his philosophy of life. Even his greatest and most original creation, the Canzoniere, is not without marks of Horace, and their fewness here, as well as their character, are a sign that Petrarch's familiarity was not of the artificial sort, but based on real assimilation of the poet. His letter to Horace begins:

Salve o dei lirici modi sovrano,

Salve o degl' Itali gloria ed onor,—

Hail! Sovereign of the lyric measure,

Hail! Italy's great pride and treasure;

and, after recounting the qualities of the poet, and acknowledging him as guide, teacher, and lord, concludes:

Tanto è l' amor che a te m'avvince; tanto

È degli affetti miei donno il tuo canto—

So great the love that bindeth me to thee;

So ruleth in my heart thy minstrelsy.

But Petrarch is a torch-bearer so far in advance of his successors that the illumination almost dies out again before they arrive. It was not until well into the fifteenth century that the long and numerous line of imitators, translators, adapters, parodists, commentators, editors, and publishers began, which has continued to the present day. The modern-Latin poets in all countries were the first, but their efforts soon gave place to attempts in the vernacular tongues. The German Eduard Stemplinger, in his Life of the Horatian Lyric Since the Renaissance, published in 1906, knows 90 English renderings of the entire Odes of Horace, 70 German, 100 French, and 48 Italian. Some are in prose, some even in dialect. The poet of Venusia is made a Burgundian, a Berliner, and even a Platt-deutsch. All of these are attempts to transfuse Horace into the veins of modern life, and are significant of their authors' conviction as to the vitalizing power of the ancient poet. No author from among the classics has been so frequently translated as Horace.

Petrarch, as we have seen, led the modern world by a century in the appreciation of Horace. It was in 1470, ninety-six years after the laureate's death, that Italy achieved the first printed edition of the poet, which was also the first in the world. This was followed in 1474 by a printing of Acro's notes, grown by accretion since their origin in the third century into a much larger body of commentary. In 1476 was published the first Horace containing both text and notes, which were those of Acro and Porphyrio, and in 1482 appeared Landinus's notes, the first printed commentary on Horace by a modern humanist. Landinus was prefaced by a Latin poem of Politian's, who, with Lorenzo dei Medici, was a sort of arbiter in taste, and who produced in 1500 a Horace of his own. Mancinelli, who, like many other scholars of the time, gave public readings and interpretations of Horace and other classics, in 1492 dedicated to the celebrated enthusiast Pomponius Laetus an edition of the Odes, Epodes, and Secular Hymn, in which he so successfully integrated the comments of Acro, Porphyrio, Landinus, and himself, that for the next hundred years it remained the most authoritative Horace. In Italy, between 1470 and 1500, appeared no fewer than 44 editions of the poet, while in France there were four and in Germany about ten. Venice alone published, from 1490 to 1500, thirteen editions containing text and commentary by "The Great Four," as they were called. The famous Aldine editions began to appear in 1501. Besides Venice, Florence, and Rome, Ferrara came early to be a brilliant center of Horatian study, Lionel d'Este and the Guarini preparing the way for the more distinguished, if less scholastic, discipleship of Ariosto and Tasso. Naples and the South displayed little activity.

Roughly speaking, the later fifteenth century was the age of manuscript recovery, commentary, and publication; the sixteenth, the century of translation, imitation, and ambitious attempt to rival the ancients on their own ground; the seventeenth and eighteenth, the centuries of critical erudition, with many commentaries and versions and much discussion of the theory of translation; and the nineteenth, the century of scientific revision and reconstruction. In the last movement, Italy had comparatively small part. Among her translators during these centuries must be mentioned Ludovico Dolce, whose excellent rendering of the Satires and Epistles was a product of the early sixteenth; Scipione Ponsa, whose faithful Ars Poetica in ottava rima appeared in the first half of the seventeenth; the advocate Borgianelli, whose brilliant version of Horace entire belongs to the second half; and the Venetian Abriani, whose complete Odes in the original meters, the first achievement of the kind, was a not unsuccessful performance which has taken its place among Horatian curiosities. Among literary critics are the names of Gravina, whose Della Ragione Poetica, full of sound scholarship and refreshing good sense, appeared in 1716 at Naples; Volpi of Padua, author of a treatise on Satire, in which the merits of Lucilius, Horace, Juvenal, and Persius were effectively discussed; and their followers, Algarotti the Venetian and Vannetti of Roveredo, in whom Horatian criticism reached its greatest altitude.

If we look outside the field of scholastic endeavor and academic imitation, and attempt to discern the effect of Horace in actual literary creation, we are confronted by the difficulty of determining exactly where imitation and adaptation cease to be artificial, and reach the degree of individuality and independence which entitles them to the name of originality. If we are to include here such authors as are manifestly indebted to suggestion or inspiration from Horace, and yet are quite as manifestly modern and Italian, we may note at least the names of Petrarch, already mentioned; the famous Cardinal Bembo, whose ideal, to write "thoughtfully and little," was a reflection of Horace; Ariosto, whose satires are in the Horatian spirit, and who, complaining to his brother Alessandro of the attitude of his patron, Cardinal Hippolyto d'Este, recites the story of the fox and the weasel, changing them to donkey and rat; Chiabrera of Savona, who wrote satire honeycombed with Horatian allusion and permeated by Horatian spirit, and who, in Leopardi's opinion, had he lived in a different age, would have been a second Horace; Testi of Ferrara, whom Ariosto's enthusiasm for Horace so kindled that he gravitated from the modern spirit to the classical; Parini of Milan, whose poem, Alla Musa, is Horatian in spirit and phrase; Leopardi, who composed a parody on the Ars Poetica; Prati, who transmuted Epode II into the Song of Hygieia; and Carducci, whose use of Horatian meters, somewhat strained, is due to the conscious desire of making Italy's past greatness serve the present. The names of Bernardo Tasso and Torquato Tasso might be added.

It is not impossible, also, that the musical debt of the world to Italy is in a measure owing to Horace. Whether the music which accompanied the Odes as they emerged from the Middle Age was only the invention of monks, or the survival of actual Horatian music from antiquity, is a question hardly to be answered; but the setting of Horace to music in the Renaissance was not without an influence. In 1507, Tritonius composed four-voice parts for twenty-two different meters of Horace and other poets. In 1526, Michael engaged in the same effort, and in 1534 Senfl developed the youthful compositions of Tritonius. All this was for school purposes. With the beginnings of Italian opera, these compositions, in which the music was without measure and held strictly to the service of poetry, came to an end. It is not unreasonable to suspect that in these early attempts at the union of ancient verse and music there exist the beginnings of the musical drama.

ii. IN FRANCE

France, where the great majority of Horatian manuscripts were preserved, was the first to produce a translation of the Odes. Grandichan in 1541, and Pelletier in 1545, published translations of the Ars Poetica which had important consequences. The famous Pleiad, whose most brilliant star, Pierre de Ronsard, was king of poetry for more than a score of years, were enthusiastic believers in the imitation of the classics as a means for the improvement of letters in France. Du Bellay, the second in magnitude, published in 1550 his Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, a manifesto of the Pleiad full of quotations from the Ars Poetica refuting a similar work of Sibilet published in 1548. Ronsard himself is said to have been the first to use the word "ode" for Horace's lyrics. The meeting of the two, in 1547, is regarded as the beginning of the French school of Renaissance poetry. Horace thus became at the beginning an influence of the first magnitude in the actual life of modern French letters. In 1579 appeared Mondot's complete translation. The versions of Dacier and Sanadon, in prose, in the earlier eighteenth century, were an innovation provoking spirited opposition in Italy. The line of translators, imitators, and enthusiasts in France is as numerous as that of other countries. The list of great authors inspired by Horace includes such names as Montaigne, "The French Horace," Malherbe, Regnier, Boileau, La Fontaine, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Voltaire, Jean Baptiste Rousseau, Le Brun, André Chénier, De Musset.

iii. IN GERMANY

In Germany, the Renaissance movement had its pronounced beginning at Heidelberg. In that city began also the active study of Horace, in the lectures on Horace in 1456. The Epistles were first printed in 1482 at Leipzig, the Epodes in 1488, and in 1492 appeared the first complete Horace. Up to 1500, about ten editions had been published, only those of 1492 and 1498 being Horace entire, and none of them with commentary except that of 1498, which had a few notes and metrical signs to indicate the structure of the verse. The first German to translate a poem of Horace was Johann Fischart, 1550-90, who rendered the second Epode in 145 rhymed couplets. The famous Silesian, Opitz, "father of German poetry," and his followers, were to Germany what the Pleiad were to France. His work on poetry, 1624, was grounded in Horace, and was long the canon. Bucholz, in 1639, produced the first translation of an entire book of the Odes in German. Weckherlin, 1548-1653, translated three Odes, Gottsched of Leipzig, 1700-66, and Breitinge of Zurich, confess Horace as master of the art of poetry, and their cities become the centers of many translations. Günther, 1695-1728, the most gifted lyric poet of his race before Klopstock, made Horace his companion and confidant of leisure hours. Hagedorn, 1708-54, forms his philosophy from Horace,—"my friend, my teacher, my companion." Of Ramler, for thirty-five years dictator of the Berlin literary world, who translated and published some of the Odes in 1769 and was called the German Horace, Lessing said that no sovereign had ever been so beautifully addressed as was Frederick the Great in his imitation of the Maecenas ode. The epoch-making Klopstock, 1724-1803, quotes, translates, and imitates Horace, and uses Horatian subjects. Heinse reads him and writes of him enthusiastically, and Platen, 1796-1835, is so full of Homer and Horace that he can do nothing of his own. Lessing and Herder are devoted Horatians, though Herder thinks that Lessing and Winckelmann are too unreserved in their enthusiasm for the imitation of classical letters. Goethe praises Horace for lyric charm and for understanding of art and life, and studies his meters while composing the Elegies. Nietzsche's letters abound in quotation and phrase. Even the Church in Germany shows the impress of Horace in some of her greatest hymns, which are in Alcaics and Sapphics of Horatian origin. To speak of the German editors, commentators, and critics of the nineteenth century would be almost to review the history of Horace in modern school and university; such has been the ardor of the German soul and the industry of the German mind.

iv. IN SPAIN

A glance at the use of Horace in Spain will afford not the least edifying of modern examples. The inventories of Spanish libraries in the Middle Age rarely contain the name of Horace, or the names of his lyric brethren, Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius. Virgil, Lucan, Martial, Seneca, and Pliny are much more frequent. It was not until the fifteenth century that reminiscences of the style and ideas of Horace began to appear in quantity. Imitation rather than translation was the vehicle of Spanish enthusiasm. The fountain of Horatianism in Spain was the imitation of Epode II, Beatus Ille, by the Marquis de Santillana, one of Castile's two first sonneteers, in the first half of the fifteenth century. Garcilaso also produced many imitations of the Odes. The Horatian lyric seemed especially congenial to the Spanish spirit and language. Fray Luís de León, of Salamanca, the first real Spanish poet, and the most inspired of all the Spanish lovers of Horace, was an example of the poet translating the poet where both were great men. He not only brought back to life once more "that marvelous sobriety, that rapidity of idea and conciseness of phrase, that terseness and brilliance, that sovereign calm and serenity in the spirit of the artist," which characterized the ancient poet, but added to the Horatian lyre the new string of Christian mysticism, and thus wedded the ancient and the modern. "Luís de León is our great Horatian poet," says Menéndez y Pelayo. Lope de Vega wrote an Ode to Liberty, and was influenced by the Epistles. The Flores de Poetas ilustres de España, arranged by Pedro Espinosa and published in 1605 at Valladolid, included translations of eighteen odes. Hardly a lyric poet of the eighteenth century failed to turn some part of Horace into Spanish. Salamanca perfected the ode, Seville the epistle, Aragon the satire. Mendoza in his nine Epistles shows his debt to Horace. In 1592, Luís de Zapata published at Lisbon a not very successful verse translation of the Ars Poetica. In 1616, Francisco de Cascales of Murcia published Fablas Poeticas, containing in dialogue the substance of the same composition, which had been translated by Espinel, 1551-1624, and which was translated again in 1684, twice in 1777, and in 1827. Seville founded a Horatian Academy. The greatest of the Spanish translators of Horace entire was Javier de Burgos, whose edition of four volumes, 1819-1844, is called by Menéndez y Pelayo the only readable complete translation of Horace, "one of the most precious and enviable jewels of our modern literature," and "perhaps the best of all Horaces in the neo-Latin tongues." The nearest rival of Burgos was Martinez de la Rosa. The greatest Spanish scholar and critic of Horace is Menéndez y Pelayo, editor of the Odes, 1882, and author of Horacio en España, 1885.

In the index of Horacio en España are to be found the names of 165 Castilian translators of the poet, 50 Portuguese, 10 Catalan, 2 Asturian, and 1 Galician. There appear the names of 29 commentators. Of complete translations, there are 6 Castilian and 1 Portuguese; of complete translations of the Odes, 6 Castilian and 7 Portuguese; of the Satires, 1 Castilian and 2 Portuguese; of the Epistles, 1 Castilian and 1 Portuguese; of the Ars Poetica, 35 Castilian, 11 Portuguese, and 1 Catalan. The sixteenth century translators were distinguished in general by facility and grace, the freshness and abandon of youth, and a considerable degree of freedom, or even license. Those of the eighteenth show a gain in accuracy and a loss in spirit.

v. IN ENGLAND

The appeal of Horace in England and English-speaking countries has been as fruitful as elsewhere in scholarship, with the possible exception of Germany. In its effect upon the actual fibre of literature and life, it has been more fruitful.

A review of Horatian study in England would include the names of Talbot and Baxter, but, above all, of the incomparably brilliant Richard Bentley, despite his excesses, themselves due to his very genius, the most famous and most stimulating critic and commentator of Horace the world has seen. His edition, appearing in 1711, provoked in 1717 the anti-Bentleian rejoinder of Richard Johnson, and in 1721 the more ambitious but equally unsuccessful attempt to discredit him by the Scotch Alexander Cunningham. The primacy in the study of Horace which Bentley conferred upon England had been enjoyed previously by the Low Countries and France, to which it had passed from Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century. The immediate sign of this transfer of the center to northern lands was the publication in 1561 at Lyons of the edition containing the text revision and critical notes of Lambinus and the commentary of the famous Cruquius of Bruges. The celebrated Scaliger was unfavorably disposed to Horace, who found a defender in Heinsius, another scholar of the Netherlands. D'Alembert, who became a sort of Ars Poetica to translators, published his Observations at Amsterdam in 1763.

An account of the English translations of the poet would include many renderings of individual poems, such as those of Dryden, Sir Stephen E. De Vere, and John Conington, and the version of Theodore Martin, probably the most successful complete metrical translation of Horace in any language. It is literally true that "every theory of translation has been exemplified in some English rendering of Horace."

It is in the field of literature, however, that the manifestations of Horace's hold upon the English are most numerous and most significant. Even Shakespeare's "small Latin" includes him, in Titus Andronicus:

Demetrius.

What's here? A scroll, and written round about!
Let's see:

Integer vitae scelerisque purus

Non eget Mauri jaculis nec arcu.

Chiron.

O, 'tis a verse in Horace; I know it well:

I read it in the grammar long ago.

The mere mention of English authors in poetry and prose who were touched and kindled by the Horatian flame would amount to a review of the whole course of English literature. It would begin principally with Spenser and Ben Jonson, who in some measure represented in their land what the Pleiad meant in France, and Opitz and his following in Germany. "Steep yourselves in the classics," was Jonson's counsel, and his countrymen did thus steep themselves to such a degree that it is possible for the student to say of Milton's times: "The door to English literature and history of the seventeenth century is open wide to those who are at ease in the presence of Latin. Many writings and events of the time may doubtless be understood and enjoyed by readers ignorant of the classics, but to them the heart and spirit of the period as a whole will hardly be revealed. Poetry, philosophy, history, biography, controversy, sermons, correspondence, even conversation,—all have come down to us from the age of Milton either written in or so touched with Latin that one is compelled to enter seventeenth century England by way of Rome as Rome must be entered by way of Athens."

Great as was the vogue of Latin in the earlier centuries, it was the first half of the eighteenth, the most critical period in English letters, that realized to the full the virtues of Horace. His words in the Ars Poetica "were accepted, even more widely than the laws of Aristotle, as the standard of critical judgment. Addison and Steele by their choice of mottoes for their periodicals, Prior by his adoption of a type of lyric that has since his time been designated as Horatian, and Pope with his imposing series of Imitations, gave such an impulse to the already widespread interest that it was carried on through the whole of the century." "Horace may be said to pervade the literature of the eighteenth century in three ways: as a teacher of political and social morality; as a master of the art of poetry; and as a sort of elegantiae arbiter." Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, and Fielding, Gay, Samuel Johnson, Chesterfield, and Walpole, were all familiar with and fond of Horace, and took him unto themselves.

In the nineteenth century, Wordsworth has an intimate familiarity with Virgil, Catullus, and Horace, but loves Horace best; Coleridge thinks highly of his literary criticism; Byron, who never was greatly fond of him, frequently quotes him; Shelley reads him with pleasure; Browning's The Ring and the Book contains many quotations from him; Thackeray makes use of phrases from the Odes "with an ease and facility which nothing but close intimacy could produce"; Andrew Lang addresses to him the most charming of his Letters to Dead Authors; and Austin Dobson is inspired by him in many of his exquisite poems in lighter vein. These names, and those in the paragraphs preceding, are not all that might be mentioned. The literature of England is honey-combed with the classic authors in general, and Horace is among the foremost. Without him and without the classics, a great part of our literary patrimony is of little use.

vi. IN THE SCHOOLS

Of the place of Horace in the schools and universities of all these countries, and of the world of western civilization in general, it is hardly necessary to speak. The enlightened sentiment of the five hundred years since the death of Petrarch has been enthusiastic in the conviction that the Greek and Latin classics are indispensable to instruction of the first quality, and that among them Horace is of exceeding value as a model of poetic taste and as an influence in the formation of a philosophy of life. If his place has been less secure in latter days, it is due less to alteration of that conviction than to extension of the educational system to the utilitarian arts and sciences, and to the passing of educational control from the few to the general average.