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me, and industriously bring an odium upon my books [by being] an agent of violent officiousness. If haply the heavy load of my paper should gall you," cast it from you, rather than throw down your pack in a rough manner where you are directed to carry it, and turn your paternal name of Asina into a jest, and make yourself a common story. Make use of your vigor over the hills, the rivers, and the fens. As soon as you have achieved your enterprise, and arrived there, you must keep your burden in this position; lest you happen to carry my bundle of books under your arm, as a clown does a lamb, or as drunken Pyrrhia [in the play does] the balls of pilfered wool, or as a tribe-guest his slippers with his fuddlingcap. You must not tell publicly, how you sweated with carrying those verses, which may detain the eyes and ears of Cæsar. Solicited with much entreaty, do your best. Finally, get you gone, farewell: take care you do not stumble, and break my orders.

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EPISTLE XIV.

TO HIS STEWARD.

He upbraids his levity for contemning a country life, which had been his choice, and being eager to return to Rome.

STEWARD of my woodlands and little farm that restores me to myself, which you despise, [though formerly] inhabited by five families, and wont to send five good senators to Varia: let us try, whether I with more fortitude pluck the thorns out of my mind, or you out of my ground: and whether Horace or his estate be in a better condition.

Though my affection and solicitude for Lamia, mourning for his brother, lamenting inconsolably for his brother's loss, detain me; nevertheless my heart and soul" carry me thither and long to break through those barriers that obstruct my way. I pronounce him the happy man who dwells in the country, you him [who lives] in the city. He to whom his neighbor's lot is agreeable, must of consequence dislike his own. Each of us is a fool for unjustly blaming the innocent place. The mind is in fault, which never escapes from itself. When you were a drudge at every one's beck, you tacitly prayed for the country: and now, [being appointed] my steward, you wish for the city, the shows, and the baths. You know I am consistent with myself, and loth to go, whenever disagreeable business drags me to Rome. We are not admirers of the same things: hence you and I disagree. For what you reckon desert and inhospitable wilds, he who is of my way of thinking calls delightful places; and dislikes what you esteem pleasant. The bagnio, I perceive, and the greasy tavern raise your inclination for the city: and this, because my little spot will sooner yield frankincense and pepper than grapes; nor is there a tavern near, which can supply you with wine; nor a minstrel harlot, to whose thrumming you may dance, cumbersome to the ground: and yet you exercise with plowshares the fallows that have been a long while untouched, you take due care of the ox when unyoked, and give him his fill with leaves stripped [from the boughs]. The sluice gives an additional trouble to an idle fellow, which, if a shower fall, must be taught by many a mound to spare the sunny meadow.

77 Augustus had rallied Horace for the shortness of his epistles, "vereri mihi videris ne majores libelli tui sint quàm ipse es;" you seem afraid that your letters should be longer than you are. The poet therefore sends a number of them together that he might make up in weight what he wanted in length. ED. DUBL.

73 Conviva tribulis. Athenæus tells us, that people of the same tribe had entertainments, called cænæ thiasæ (probably not unlike our modern clubs), which were regulated by laws. The guests carried their bonnets, to preserve them from the weather; and slippers to put on when they went into the house of the master of the feast. ED. DUBL.

Come now, attend to what hinders our agreeing. [Me,] whom fine garments and dressed locks adorned, whom you

79 When the Latins use mens animusque or mens animi, they would express all the faculties of the soul. Mens regards the superior and intelligent part, animus the sensible and inferior, the source of the passions.

DAC.

80 Mediastinus was a slave of the lowest kind, who had no regular service appointed for him, but waited upon other slaves in the vilest employments. Among other directions given by Cato to his son, when he went to the army, "Ille imperator, tu illi ac cæteris Mediastinus." ED. DUBL.

81 Horace, to render the comparison between himself and his slave more just, draws a picture of the life they passed in their youth at Rome. He confesses that his own conduct had not been extremely regular, yet that of his slave, who was probably the confidant of his pleasures, had not been more wise. But while the master renounces the follies of his 22. Tractus uter plures lepores, uter educet apros; Utra magis pisces et echinos æquora celent, Pinguis ut inde domum possim Phæaxque que reverti.

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know to have pleased venal Cynara without a present, whom [you have seen] quaff flowing Falernian from noon-a short supper [now] delights, and a nap upon the green turf by the stream side: nor is it a shame to have been gay, but not to break off that gayety. There there is no one who reduces" my possessions with envious eye, nor poisons them with obscure malice and biting slander; the neighbors smile at me removing clods and stones. You had rather be munching your daily allowance with the slaves in town; you earnestly pray to be of the number of these: [while my] cunning foot-boy envies you the use of the firing, the flocks, and the garden. The lazy ox wishes for the horse's trappings: the horse wishes to go to plow. But I shall be of opinion, that each of them ought contentedly to exercise that art which he understands.

EPISTLE XV.

TO C. NEUMONIUS VALA.

Preparing to go to the baths either at Velia or Salernum, he inquires after the healthfulness and agreeableness of the places..

Ir is your part, Vala, to write to me (and mine to give youth, though without blushing for them, the servant would continue in them as long as he lived. DAC.

82 Limat. Limis oculis aspicere aliquem, to look askew, or askance; but the Latins never used limare in that sense. The Scholiast explains the word limat by deterit, imminuit, for it was a superstition among the ancients, as Dacier observes, that an envious eye could lessen what it looked at, and corrupt our enjoyment of it. ED. DUB. "limat" = " quasi lima atterit, attenuare conatur." ORELLI.

83 Quæ sit hiems Velicæ, etc. The arrangement in this Epistle is very intricate. The first twenty-five lines form one strained hyperbaton. The natural order is:

25. Scribere te nobis, tibi nos accedere par est,

Quæ sit hiems Veliæ, quod cœlum, Vala, Salerni ;
Quorum hominum regio, et qualis via; (
14. Major utrum populum frumenti copia pascat;
Collectosne bibant imbres, puteosne perennes
Jugis aquæ; (

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M'CAUL

credit to your information) what sort of a winter it is at Velia, what the air at Salernum, what kind of inhabitants the country consists of, and how the road is (for Antonius Musa" [pronounces] Baiæ to be of no service to me; yet makes me obnoxious to the place, when I am bathed in cold water" even in the midst of the frost [by his prescription]. In truth, the village murmurs at their myrtle-groves being deserted, and the sulphurous waters, said to expel lingering disorders from the nerves, despised; envying those invalids, who have the courage to expose their head and breast to the Clusian springs, and retire to Gabii and [such] cold countries. My course must be altered," and my horse driven beyond his accustomed stages. Whither are you going? will the angry rider say, pulling in the left-hand rein, I am not bound for Cumæ or Baiæ:- but the horse's ear is in the bit.) [You must inform me likewise] which of the two people is supported by the greatest abundance of corn; whether they drink rain-water collected [in reservoirs], or from perennial wells of never-failing water (for as to the wine of that part I give myself no trouble; at my country-seat I can dispense and bear with any thing: but when I have arrived at a sea-port, I insist upon that which is generous and mellow, such as may drive away my cares, such as may flow into my veins and animal spirits with a rich supply of hope, such as may supply me with words, such as may make me appear young to my Lucanian mistress). Which tract of land produces most hares, which boars: which seas harbor the most fishes and sea-urchins, that I may be able to return home thence in good case, and like a Phæacian.

84 Antonius Musa was a freeman of Augustus, and brother of Euphorbus, physician to king Juba. He had the happiness of curing Augustus of a distemper, which his other physicians thought desperate, and this cure raised both the faculty and its professors out of contempt. The prince and people contended in honoring a man who had restored a life so valuable to the state. He was rewarded with a considerable sum of money; he was exempted from all public taxes; he was made free of Rome, allowed to wear a gold ring, and his statue was placed next to that of Æsculapius. These glorious distinctions were not confined to him alone, but extended to all of the profession, and the disciples of Hippocrates were then first allowed the privileges ivileges and immunities of a Roman citizen. The cold bath was now prescribed for all disorders, but the same prescription which had cured Augustus, having unhappily killed Marcellus, the science of physic, and the people who practiced it, fell into their original contempt. After this example, we may believe, that Horace would not be willing to run the same hazard, and therefore we may naturally date this letter in the beginning of 731, six or seven months after the recovery of Augustus, which happened in August. SAN.

85 This does not suppose that he had already gone into the cold bath, but that he proposed it, and was yet undetermined between that of Salernum and Velia. "Perluor" does not mark a past action, but the present disposition, as if he had said, "cùm in eo sum ut perluar." SAN.

86 Mutandus locus est. "We must go no more to Baiæ;" where the poet had frequently been. Sanadon blames this apostrophe; for although a rider naturally enough may sometimes talk to his horse, yet an author can hardly be supposed to sit down to write to him.

87 At the entrance into Campania the road divides; the right leads to - Cuma and Baiæ; the left to Capua, Salernum, and Velia. The horse is going to his usual stage at Baiæ, but Horace turns him to the left, to the Lucanian road. TORR.

When Mænius, having bravely made away with his paternal and maternal estates, began to be accounted a merry fellow-a vagabond droll, who had no certain place of living; who, when dinnerless, could not distinguish a fellow-citizen from an enemy; unmerciful in forging any scandal against any person; the pest, and hurricane, and gulf of the market; whatever he could get, he gave to his greedy gut. This fellow, when he had extorted little or nothing from the favorers of his iniquity, or those that dreaded it, would eat up whole dishes of coarse tripe and lamb's entrails; as much as would have sufficed three bears; then truly, [like] reformer Bestius," would he say, that the bellies" of extravagant fellows ought to be branded with a red-hot iron. The same man [however], when he had reduced to smoke and ashes whatever more considerable booty he had gotten; 'Faith, said he, I do not wonder if some persons eat up their estates; since nothing is better than a fat thrush, nothing finer than a large sow's paunch. In fact, I am just such another myself; for, when

88 Cruquius happily entered into the spirit of this passage, when he understood Bestius as a person of different character from that of Mænius. Our commentators have not only mistaken the sense of their author, but substituted Mænius, in direct contradiction to all the manuscripts, in the place of Bestius. Corrector hath been luckily preserved in a manuscript extremely ancient, and well agrees with the character of Cornelius Bestius, whom Persius mentions as remarkable for a severity of manners. FRAN.

89 The Greeks and Romans branded the belly of a gluttonous slave; the feet of a fugitive; the hands of a thief; and the tongue of a babbler. DAC. 90 Verterat in fumum ac cinerem. A proverbial expression, as if smoke and ashes were all the remains of the large estate he had consumed.

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