war; and afterwards subsiding quietly into literary ease, the partisan of Brutus softens into the friend of Maecenas, and the happy subject, if not the flatterer, of Augustus. Nor is his personal history merely illustrative of his times in its broader outline; every part of it, which is revealed to us in his poetry, is equally instructive. Even the parentage of the poet is connected with the difficult but important questions of the extent to which slavery in the Roman world was affected by manumission, and the formation of that middle class (the libertini), with their privileges, and the estimation in which they were held by society. His birthplace in the romantic scenery, and among the simple virtues of the old Italian yeomanry; his Roman education; his residence at Athens; his military services; the confiscation of his estate; his fortunes as a literary adventurer, cast upon the world in Rome; the state of Roman poetry when he commenced his career; the degree in which his compositions were Roman and original, or but the naturalization of new forms of Grecian poetry; the influence of the different sects of philosophy on the literature and manners of the age; even the state of religion, particularly as it affected the higher and more intellectual orders, at this momentous crisis when Christianity was about to be revealed to mankind every circumstance in the life of the Poet is an incident in the history of man. The influences which formed his moral and poetical character, are the prevalent modes of feeling and thought among the people, who had achieved the conquest of the

world, and, weary of their own furious contentions, now began to slumber in the proud consciousness of universal empire. In him as in an individual example appears the change which took place in the fortunes, position, sentiments, occupations, estimation, character, mode of living, when the Roman, from the citizen of a free and turbulent republic, became the subject of a peaceful monarchy, disguised indeed, but not, therefore, the less arbitrary: while his acquaintance, and even his intimate friends, extending through almost every gradation of society, show the same influences, as they affect persons of different characters, talents, or station. Horace is exactly in that happy intermediate rank which connects both extremes. His poems are inscribed to Agrippa or Mæcenas, even to the Emperor himself, to his humbler private friend, or to his bailiff. He unites, in the same way, the literary with the social life; he shows the station assumed by or granted to mere men of letters, when the orator in the senate or in the forum ceded his place to the agreeable writer; the man who excited or composed at his will the strong passions of the Roman people, had lost. his occupation and his power, which devolved, as far as the literary part of his fame, upon the popular author. The mingling intellectual elements blend together, even in more singular union, in the mind. of the Poet. Grecian education and tastes have not polished off the old Roman independence; the imitator of Greek forms of verse writes the purest vernacular Latin; the Epicurean philosophy has not