clouds that passed over it, till the hour of his last illness, when death came swiftly upon him. Few men ever had a more pleasant life than the poet; he had a good father, a liberal education, genius, a Muse ready to his call, popularity, independence, contentment, honour, troops of friends. Against this are to be set troubles and difficulties soon over, a certain amount of rivalry and jealousy, and health that was not robust. Though he had not all the conditions of a happy life, which Martial enumerates, yet he had a goodly share of them.

Horace tells us that he wrote for his friends, not for the public. But we are all his friends now. The works of Varius are lost, and there was no opportunity for Virgil in his poems to mention his brother poet. Horace's name does not appear in the verses of Propertius or Tibullus, though to Tibullus Horace has written an Ode and an Epistle. Ovid is the only one of the contemporary poets who mentions him, saying that tuneful Horace charmed his ears by his finished odes sung to the Italian lyre. It is odd that Martial, enumerating the birth-places of famous Latin poets, has omitted Horace, for the Flaccus there spoken of is Valerius Flaccus, a very inferior Flaccus. However, in other places Martial joins Horace's name with Virgil; and it is plain from Persius, who lived only about sixty years after Horace, and from Juvenal and Quintilian, that Horace had soon become a standard author. In the middle ages his fame fell far short of that of Virgil, probably it did not equal even that of Lucan; but since the revival of classical literature Horace has been without comparison the most popular of Latin authors; indeed there is no Greek so popular, hardly any modern one. Dr Douglas, an eminent physician in the days of George II., collected even then no fewer than 400 editions of Horace. Mr Yonge, in his edition of Horace, says that the list of these editions given 50 years ago by Mitscherlich extends over a hundred pages. Great has been the learning and ingenuity devoted to the elucidation of the text and meaning of Horace. Bentley's famous edition is in its way the most remarkable of all editions of Horace. None of the productions of Bentley display greater merits and greater faults than his edition of Horace, never were his ability and his arrogance more clearly seen; but scholars have said that almost as much is to be learnt from the mistakes of Bentley as from the careful judgment of other editors. The edition appeared on the 8th of December, the birthday of Horace, 1777 years after that event. Mr Yonge says that he

has lived at Eton in a Horatian atmosphere, and Eton men seem to regard Horace as an Etonian, an opinion in which other schools can hardly be expected to agree. Many who have little liking for the classics, and have an unpleasant recollection of their early drudgery in them, make an exception in favour of Horace, the one author in Greek and Latin whom they still read. And many scholars, who have not a few favourites among the ancient writers, give their dearest affection to Horace. With some men, as with the Abbé de Chaupy, and with the witty Galiani, this love has risen to a passion of enthusiasm. The latter went so far as to write a treatise on the principles of the Laws of Nature and Nations, deduced from the poems of Horace. The Abbé de Chaupy, says Rigault, used to thank those who spoke well of Horace. Old women that he disliked were to him so many Canidias; a young lady that pleased him was a Lalage. Malherbe said that he made Horace his breviary. If Horace's wit endears him to Frenchmen, his strong common sense no less recommends him to Englishmen. And German editions of the poet are almost innumerable. Horace is especially the poet of the man of the world, of the gentleman: but on so many points do his writings touch, that they have an interest for those whose life is more laborious and eventful. Condorcet had a Horace with him in the dungeon at Paris where he died; De Witt, the Pensionary of Holland, a man of capacity and integrity, is said, when the mob were about to murder him and his brother, to have repeated the verses of the Ode of Horace, which in Stoic style describe the righteous and resolute man as unshaken from his purpose by the fury of citizens who bid him do what is wrong. Lessing counted Horace as one of those spirits to whose name he, like the Abbé de Chaupy, was unwilling that any taint of dishonour shou attach. Hooker, as Yonge tells us from Walton's Life, in the preface to his edition of Horace, was found in the fields tending his few seep with a Horace in his hand. Many can remember with what enthusiasm Dr Butler at Shrewsbury and Dr Keate at Eton use to teach Horace. Yonge in his notes gives us many passages in modern writers suggested by Horace. It is true that Niebuhr, lecturing in the year 1827, speaks as if the admiration of Horace was a feeling that then wavered; and Niebuhr himself does scanty justice to his poetry, and still less to his character. A writer who is so singular in his views as to account Catullus the greatest poet of Rome, would not estimate Horace fairly; the wild and impulsive Catullus, with the

loud wailings of his passion, moves him more than the mild and quiet Horace. But, in comparison with Horace, Catullus is little read and enjoyed. Allusions to Horace are expected to be at once recognized. In the short compass of the first Epistle of the first book there are many passages that have become almost proverbial. Adaptations of his lines, some dignified, some jocular, have been made continually. Thus, as Lord Lytton says in his Introduction to the Odes, Mr Pitt never moved the House of Commons more than when to England contending with Napoleon he applied the passage of Horace which compares Rome in her struggle with Hannibal to the oak, "which lopped by axes rude receives new life, yea from the very steel." When Dr Goodall, Provost of Eton, was asked what he thought of omnibuses, which had then just been introduced into London, he replied "Horace has settled this by saying 'Omnibus hoc vitium est.' And again, being asked to take some trifle at dinner, he said "No thank you, 'hæ nugæ seria ducunt in mala.'"

What then are the causes of this marvellous popularity? The question has often been discussed, only too fully. Indeed there was no reason to say very much on the point, for the qualities of a writer who pleases so many must lie on the surface. It is said that his distinguishing characteristic is good common sense; and indeed, whether he is serious or jesting, he never forgets common sense. But this alone makes no poet popular. Boileau is considered the very impersonification of common sense. Yet Boileau is not popular as Horace is. So to common sense must be added his wit, a yit fine, good-natured, pleasant, not overstrained, sensible. Never was anything more untrue than what Niebuhr says of him: "He looks upon everything as a folly, and tries to sneer at everything, teating what is most venerable with irreverence; this becom at last a bad habit in him." On the contrary, Horace gives honour where honour is due, he does not sneer at patriotism, temperance, modesty, courage, simplicity, kindness, contentment; he reverences virtue, the laws of his country, the temples of the gods, the memory of the great men of Rome; so far from sneering becoming a bad habit with him, in his later writings he shows more and more a serious and chastened temper. In him, as in Sydney Smith, is the union of wit and wisdom. He teaches the truth while he laughs. His irony does not weary his hearers as that of Socrates is said to have done, of whom it has been amusingly, though of course unjustly

said "that he was put to death because he was such a bore." Horace plainly knew his own faults, and practised real self-examination, and does not blame himself, as we often do, for faults which we have not, while we ignore those which we have. To his wisdom and wit we must add, as another cause of his popularity, the form of his poetry. The ancients, inferior to the moderns in ideas, are superior in form. In this is a justification of their being used as a means of education. This is true of Horace in an eminent degree. In his Epodes and even in his Satires there is less neatness and terseness of expression than in the Odes and Epistles, in which writings all is put together as in mosaic. The very objection urged with truth against Horace, that he is common-place, lets us see one of the causes of his popularity. He says common things a little better than others say them, and, though often only a little above mediocrity, is still just above it. As we rightly honour a man, who "though he has done no remarkable single act, yet is remarkable for the steady and unbroken performance of many daily duties," so we are fond of the poet, who, though he has not been caught up into paradise, nor been in hell, though he does not fill us with the terrors of the imagination, or delight us with the magic forms of wonder, yet speaks happily and pleasantly of the ordinary sorrows and homely joys of life, whom i we feel to be a genial companion, a trifler in small things, but no trifler in what is really good and grave. Wit, wisdom, terseness, grace, are the main causes of his popularity. Most of us like him best in his lighter vein, as Blair remarked long ago. He was free from Lucretius' awkwardness of form, Catullus' extravagance, Pro-. pertius' affectation, Virgil's solemnity, Ovid's conceits, Tibullus" excess of sadness, Lucan's pedantry, Persius' obscurity, Juvenal's bad taste. He has no fellow in literature. There was something in him that no Greek author, no modern has; Providence made but one Horace; we love him, and the reason why we cannot fully tell.

The man Horace is more interesting than his writings, or, to speak more correctly, the main interest of his writings is in himself. We might call his works "Horace's Autobiography." To use his own expression about Lucilius, his whole life stands out before us as in a picture. Of none of the ancients do we know so much, not of Socrates, or Cicero, or St Paul. Almost what Boswell is to Johnson, Horace is to himself. We can see him, as he really was, both in body and soul. Everything about him is familiar to us. His faults are known to us, his very foibles and awkwardnesses.

Yet in his account of himself there is nothing morbid. Like Walter Scott, he had a thoroughly healthy mind. In one epistle he speaks of himself as if he were not so-minded. But this was plainly only a passing malady of soul. He seems almost as a personal friend to each of us. What would we not give to spend one evening with him, to take a walk over his Sabine farm with him, to sit by his fountain, to hear him tell a tale, or discuss a point? We feel bound to defend him, as we would defend an absent friend.

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Now the gravest charge brought against him is that of having been a servile flatterer in the court of a cruel and cold-hearted tyrant, of having been a coward who ran away in battle, a traitor to liberty, one who for a farm sold his independence, one who, knowing the sorrows and seeing the wounds of his country, “did not choose to let his heart bleed," but drowned his cares in cups wine. If this charge against him be just, we are bound to answer it. Yet we must be on our guard against exaggeration on the other side. Our poet was no prophet or martyr, he was no Cato or Socrates, he was not made of the stuff of which those are made who die for an idea, whether it be a real idea or a phantasy. As we think of his life of 57 years, during full 30 of which he was an author, it is striking to consider the events that happened in that time. When he was born, Pompey was warring in the east. The name of the republic was still great. When he was three years old, the conspiracy of Catiline was put down. When he wandered as a child in the deep valleys of the Apennines, Julius Cæsar was subduing Gaul. When he died, the generation was fast passing away that remembered the days of republican liberty, and the Roman world was under the well-established power of Augustus. Goethe, quoted by Niebuhr, said that there never was a more senseless act than the assassination of Julius Cæsar. Rebellions against Augustus were quite as senseless. Horace was young when he served in the last army of the republic, but his strong common sense must have opened his eyes to the character of those who served with him, and he must have known quite well that at any rate after the battle of Philippi the republic was an idle dream. A person of his character adapted himself to circumstances. We perhaps judge severely of the principal persons of those times, because we know what sad years of despotism followed, and can see clearly how rapidly the new system was undermining all manly virtues. But one alive then, unable to see all that was to follow, but who had wit