There is no ground for supposing that any one of the scores of translations and imitations of the Ars Poetica had ever met Byron’s eye[131]; the nearest prototypes in English poetry of Hints from Horace are probably Pope’s Essay on Criticism and Epistle to Augustus. Certain superficial resemblances have led critics to the inference that Pope’s Essay is accountable for much of Byron’s Hints. It is remarkable that the two authors, born just a century apart, should have attempted satires so similar in tone at ages approximately the same. Pope’s Essay on Criticism, composed probably in 1709, was printed in 1711, a hundred years before Byron wrote Hints from Horace. In this work Pope tried to do for criticism what Horace had done for poetry: that is, to codify and express in compact form some generally accepted principles of the art. Pope, however, saw fit to introduce incidentally some conventional precepts concerning the subject-matter of literary criticism, borrowing them from Horace, and Horace’s French imitator, Boileau. Thus in Pope’s Essay are to be found many of the maxims which Byron transferred into Hints from Horace from the Latin source. The correspondence between such passages in the Essay and their counterparts in Hints from Horace has led Weiser to conclude, from a study of parallel ideas, that Byron’s poem is based, to a large extent, on Pope’s work.[132] His thesis, however, has been all but conclusively refuted by Levy, who shows that in the nine instances of parallelism adduced by Weiser as evidence, the lines quoted from Hints from Horace are really much closer to lines from the Ars Poetica than they are to the citations from the Essay on Criticism.[133] Undoubtedly there are couplets in the Hints that recall the Essay; but in view of Byron’s specific statement of his obligation to Horace, it would be rash to assume that Pope’s influence was more than a general one, the natural result of Byron’s careful study of his style and manner. Pope’s Epistle to Augustus, a paraphrase of Horace’s Book II, Epistle 1, is, in several respects, not unlike Hints from Horace. It pursues the same method in substituting English names for Greek and Roman ones, and in replacing classical references by allusions to contemporary life. Moreover the Epistle, with its judgment on English writers, its criticism of the drama, and its estimate of the age, is structurally more akin to Hints from Horace than is ordinarily supposed.
It would be superfluous to attempt to add anything to Professor Cook’s work in outlining the instances in which Byron merely translated Horace. A single illustration will suffice to show how the same Latin lines were treated by Pope, and, later, by Byron. Horace’s counsel:—
“Vos exemplaria Græca
Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna”[134]
is paraphrased roughly in the Essay on Criticism as,
“Be Homer’s works your study and delight,
Read them by day and meditate by night.”[135]
In this case Byron’s version,
“Ye who seek finished models, never cease
By day and night to read the works of Greece,”[136]