“Nullus argento color est avaris
Abdito terris”—
refers, not as we have been taught to interpret it, to the unwrought silver lying hidden as yet in the mine, but to those choice productions of ancient art—Syracusan medallions, for instance, or the rarer tetradrachms of the Seleucidæ—which blush unseen in their subterranean lurking-places, and are kept out of our cabinets by that churlish miser the earth. And he holds that the poet very consistently, in the same ode, assigns the regal diadem, and the laurel crown of virtue, not to the man who is simply master enough of himself not to covet his neighbour’s money-bags,
“Quisquis ingentes oculo irretorto
Spectat acervos,”
but rather to the noble self-denial of that numismatist, who can pass from the contemplation of the well-stored cabinet of his rival without one sidelong glance of envy.
And in that well-known passage where Horace says, in a rather boastful strain, that the fame of his lyric poetry will be more durable than bronze, our friend observes that if the poet alluded to the statues of bronze which met his eye at every turn in the city of Rome, it did not follow that his lyric fame would be of any long duration; for of all articles of bronze the statue was doomed to the earliest destruction, and but few, in comparison with the number of marble statues, have come down to our time. Many a graceful figure which Horace had seen and admired in the palace of Mecænas, for instance, ere many centuries had elapsed was melted down by greedy plunderers, and played its part a second time in the brazen caldron of the housewife. But the medal of bronze survives the wear and tear of centuries full a score. The medal it is,
“Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
Possit diruere, aut innumerabilis
Annorum series, et fuga temporum.”