great number. It is such maxims that strike the attention, and remain in the memory of Horace's admirers; no sustained work of theirs is directed and influenced by an underlying philosophy of his; a consistent philosophy would be difficult to find in Horace. Johnson was fond of his Odes, and would frequently quote one entire; but in such writings as the Rambler, or the Lives of the Poets, he follows the universal custom of illustrating from Horace, or of building his argument round one of his maxims. The fashion of using mottos from Horace grew out of this very Horatian characteristic, and at the same time increased the tendency to consider lines and phrases, apart from their context, as complete pieces of argument. Pope, indeed, imitated many of his Satires and Epistles, but he used them as mere vehicles for his own ideas, and the result was a series of brilliant satires distinctly characteristic of Pope, in which a suggestion of Horace remains only here and there, in some memorable translation of lines and brief passages which Pope had found it convenient for his purpose to retain. The poems of Horace that have always been taken as a whole, and that must be kept in their entirety, are few in number. As such, the Ninth Epistle of the First Book, a letter of introduction addressed to Tiberius, which was cleverly imitated by Prior, which Steele, in No. 493 of the Spectator, translated, and to which he awarded the highest praise, stands pre-eminent. The Ninth Ode of the Third Book, Horace and Lydia, is seldom quoted save as a whole; the Fifth and Thirteenth Odes of the First Book, each an exquisitely complete poem as it stands, have single lines that have been frequently quoted. The six great patriotic Odes of the Third Book, bound together as they are by the one unifying idea, yet lend themselves to dissection for frequent and promiscuous quoting. What has so far been said leads to the conclusion that Horace's writings neither have been, nor need be, taken as a whole for an estimate of him, and of his influence upon English authors. In spite of the central thought that is to be found in each one of his Satires and Epistles, he is better known through the many striking lines collected at random from his writings. Such a collection is characteristic of him, and he may be accurately judged by these scattered sayings; these 'disjecti membra poetæ' always bear his distinctive stamp. So characteristic are his utterances that, amidst all the inaccurate and careless quotation of him prevalent in the eighteenth century, it is seldom that a mistake is made in his actual authorship that the quotation from another classic author is attributed to him. The instances where this occurs are striking by their rarity. Exerting his influence, as he does, by means of these detached utterances, his power to direct the minds of the men who were quoting him so frequently is not apparent, until it has been ascertained just how much they depended upon his axioms to express their own guiding principles. It is illuminative of the general character of the eighteenth century that, at a period of classical cultivation which was often superficial, as any cultivation applied wholesale is apt to be, Horace was the most frequently quoted and deferred to of any classic authordeferred to even more generally than Virgil, with his higher political ideals and purer poetic genius, and more often than the much-quoted Cicero; and this at a time when writers had so much opportunity to influence the trend of political events. In the reign of Augustus, Horace had gathered from many sources such practical and workable tenets as should strengthen the new-formed empire, and teach men to live soberly and sanely; and his maxims naturally fitted the needs of a similar situation and a similar spirit in England. Equally illuminating is the noticeable tendency to use the Satires and Epistles more than the Odes, and, where the Odes were used, to select chiefly those parts that would have some utilitarian value, rather than to seek the beauties in which they are so abundantly rich. 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 elegantiæ arbiter. In his first capacity he probably directed, with no inconsiderable power, the endeavor of the periodical and pamphlet writers to inculcate the ordinary social virtues in their readers. Such papers as the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian, with the later periodicals that grew out of the efforts of Addison and Steele-like Fielding's Champion, True Patriot, and Covent-Garden Journal, or Johnson's Rambler-were an eighteenth-century rejuvenation of Horace's Satires and Epistles. Horace by his satiric raillery had tried to lead his contemporaries into the path of civic virtue; and the periodical writers above mentioned employed exactly the same methods to cajole society, if possible, out of its extravagant absurdities, and also to set forth to the disaffected elements the wisdom, or at least the advisability, of becoming loyal subjects of the new régime. The fact that Horace was the favorite author for the mottos with which almost all these papers began their lucubrations, rather than Juvenal on the one hand, or Virgil on the other, is evidence that their writers were conscious of his special value and significance to them. Neither he nor they made exalted demands for civic righteousness; both would be satisfied if they could coax their readers into becoming fairly sensible, decent citizens. It had been Horace's function at the court of Augustus to point out the advantages of the newly formed empire; and those English writers who assumed the duty of persuading the people that with the O navis, referent in mare te novi It is probable that all the periodical and pamphleteering writers followed the impetus to the seeking of appropriate mottos in Horace which had been given by Addison and Steele; but there is no evidence, in the better writers of the time at least, that they borrowed their quotations direct and wholesale from the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian. On the contrary, it seems pretty clear that all were familiar either with scraps and sayings from Horace, gathered from Lilly's famous grammar and from current literature, or, more frequently, with his writings as a whole, and that they had been made more at home with them by the many and diverse translations and imitations in circulation. The greatest, though perhaps the most indirect, influence exerted by Horace upon the literature of the eighteenth century was in his function as teacher of the art of writing. It was his belief that, although a writer must be endowed by nature with some genius, this is not enough, and genius must be schooled by art: Ego nec studium sine divite vena Nec rude quid prosit video ingenium; alterius sic 10. 1. 14. 2 A. P. 409-411. This idea was developed to its fullest extent in the eighteenth century, and art threatened to usurp the place of genius. Horace is rich in rules for the training of the artist. Boileau, when he published L'Art Poétique, had crystallized for the English nation, as well as for his own race, the rules that are not only contained in Horace's Ars Poetica, but are scattered throughout his literary satires and epistles. English laws of poetry were formed upon the French laws, which in their turn had been formed upon classic literature; and, through French influence, the study of the classics, and especially of the classic laws for poetry, received a fresh impetus in England. So that Boileau dropped into the background, and Horace's Art of Poetry became the leading authority. Unquestionably the most frequently quoted literary authority throughout this century was Horace's Ars Poetica; and beside it his two other literary Epistles of the Second Book, and the Fourth and the Tenth Satires of the First Book, took second rank. The leaves of the Ars Poetica were well thumbed by both scribblers and writers of repute, and its phraseology became part of the literary language. As Horace's precision, and his unwearying endeavor for exquisiteness of diction, often crushed all spontaneity in his Odes, so his influence upon the eighteenth century, through the rules he had laid down, and through the development of them in the French school of literature, tended to encourage precision and measured correctness, and to crush the genius that would cast rules aside, and walk alone. Especially were the early writers of the century so bound and subject to his authority; and the height to which a careful following of his rules may bring a poet of genius is exemplified by the perfect precision of Pope's verse; only in his Rape of the Lock has Pope indicated |