Now smouldering in grey dust.
Poor Lyce indeed! what had she done to be so scourged? One address we miss: there is no ode in this book to Maecenas, who was out of favour with Augustus, and had lost all political influence. But the friend is not sunk in the courtier. The Ides or 13th of April is his old patron's birthday—a nativity, says Horace, dearer to him almost than his own, and he keeps it always as a feast. With a somewhat ghostly resurrection of voluptuousness dead and gone he bids Phyllis come and keep it with him. All things are ready, a cask of Alban nine years old is broached, the servants are in a stir, the altar wreathed for sacrifice, the flames curling up the kitchen chimney, ivy and parsley gathered to make a wreath for Phyllis' hair. Come then, sweet girl, last of my loves; for never again shall this heart take fire at a woman's face—come, and learn of me a tune to sing with that dear voice, and drive away dull care. I am told that every man in making love assures the charmer that no woman shall ever succeed her in his regards; but this is probably a veritable amorous swan-song. He was older than are most men at fifty-two. Years as they pass, he sadly says, bereave us one by one of all our precious things; of mirth, of loves, of banquets; at last the Muse herself spreads wings to follow them. "You have sported long enough," she says, "with Amaryllis in the shade, you have eaten and drunk your fill, it is time for you to quit the scene." And so the curtain falls.
To our great loss there is no contemporary portrait of Horace. He tells us himself (Ep. II, ii, 214; I, xx, 29) that he was short of stature, his hair black but early tinged with grey; that he loved to bask in sunshine, that his temper was irascible but easily appeased. In advanced life he became fat; Augustus jests with him rather coarsely on his protuberant figure. The portrait prefixed to this volume is from a Contorniate, or bronze medallion of the time of Constantine, representing the poet's likeness as traditionally preserved amongst his countrymen three hundred years after his death.
The oldest extant manuscript of his works is probably that in the public library of Berne, and dates from the ninth century. The earliest printed edition, bearing neither date nor printer's name, is supposed to have been published at Milan in 1470. Editions were also printed at Florence and at Venice in 1482, and a third at Venice in 1492. An illustrated edition on vellum was brought out by Aldus in 1501, and reissued in 1509, 1514, 1519. The Florence Press of the Giunti produced splendid specimens in 1503, 1514, 1519. Between this date and the end of the century seven more came forth from famous presses. Of modern editions we may notice the vellum Bodoni folio of 1791, and the matchless Didot of 1799 with its exquisite copperplate vignettes. Fortunate is the collector who possesses the genuine first edition of Pine's "Horace," 1733. It is known by an error in the text, corrected in the subsequent and less bibliographically valuable impression of the same year. A beautifully pictorial book is Dean Milman's; the student will prefer Orelli, Macleane, Yonge, Munro and King, or Dean Wickham's scholarly volumes.
In composing this modest little book I have had in view principally readers altogether ignorant of Latin, but wishing to know something of a writer lauded enthusiastically by all classical scholars: they will observe that I have not introduced into its pages a single Latin word. I have nourished also the hope that it might be serviceable to those who have forgotten, but would like to recover, the Horace which they learned at school; and to them I would venture to recommend the little copy of the Latin text with Conington's version attached, in "Bell's Pocket Classics." Latinless readers of course must read him in English or not at all. No translation can quite convey the cryptic charm of any original, whether poetry or prose. "Only a bishop," said Lord Chesterfield, "is improved by translation." But prose is far easier to render faithfully than verse; and I have said that either Conington's or Dean Wickham's version of the Satires and Epistles, which are both virtually in prose, will tell them what Horace said, and sometimes very nearly how he said it. On the Odes a host of English writers have experimented. Milton tried his hand on one, with a result reflecting neither Milton nor Horace. Dryden has shown what he could have done but would not do in his tantalising fragment of the Ode to Fortune. Pope transformed the later Ode to Venus into a purely English poem, with a gracefully artificial mechanism quite unlike the natural flow of the original. Marvell's noble "Horatian Ode," with its superb stanzas on the death of Charles I, shows what he might have achieved, but did not attempt. Francis' rendering of 1765 is generally respectable, and in default of a better was universally read and quoted by his contemporaries: once, in the Ode to Pyrrhus (III, xx) he attains singular grace of phrase and metre. Cowper translated two Odes and imitated two more, not without happy touches, but with insertions and omissions that lower poetry into commonplace. Of Calverley's few attempts three are notably good; a resounding line in his "Leuconoe" (I, xi):
Which flings now the flagging sea-wave on the obstinate sandstone reef,
is at once Horatian and Tennysonian; and his "Oh! where is all thy loveliness?" in the later Ode to Lyce has caught marvellously the minor key of tender memory which relieves the brutality of that ruthless flagellation. Mr. Goldwin Smith's more numerous "Bay Leaves" are fashioned all in goodly measure; and his "Blest man who far from care and strife" well transfers to English the breathlessness of Horace's sham pastoral ecstasy. Of more ambitious translators Bulwer Lytton catches now and then the careless rapture of his original; Sir Theodore Martin is always musical and flowing, sometimes miraculously fortunate in his metres, but intentionally unliteral and free. Conington is rigidly faithful, oftentimes tersely forcible; but misses lyrical sweetness. Perhaps, if Marvell, Herrick, Cowley, Prior, the now forgotten William Spencer, Tom Moore, Thackeray, could be alchemized into one, they might combine to yield an English Horace. Until eclectic nature, emulating the Grecian sculptor, shall fashion an archetype from these seven models, the vernacular student, with his Martin and his Conington, sipping from each alternately, like Horace's Matine bee (IV, ii, 27), the terseness of the professor and the sweetness of the poet, may find in them some echo from the ever-shifting tonality of the Odes, something of their verbal felicity, something of their thrilling wistfulness; may strive not quite unsuccessfully, in the words of Tennyson's "Timbuctoo," to attain by shadowing forth the unattainable.