Horace (Paperback)

Excerpt: ...he would not have become through nineteen centuries the best beloved of Latin poets: beloved in his own time alike by the weary Atlas Augustus and the refined sensualist Maecenas; "playing round the heartstrings" of the stern censor Persius; endowed by Petronius and Quintilian with the prize of incommunicable felicity; the darling of Dante, Montaigne, Voltaire, Chesterfield; the "old popular Horace" of Tennyson; the Horace whose "sad earnestness and vivid exactness" pierced the soul and brain of aged John Henry Newman. "His poems," says a great French critic (St. Beuve, "Horace"), "form a manual of good taste, of poetic feeling, of practical and worldly wisdom. The Christian has his Bible; the scholar his Homer; Port Royal lived on St. Augustine; an earlier philosophy on Montaigne; Horace comes within the range of all: in reading him we break not in any way with modernity, yet retain our hold upon antiquity. I know nothing more delightful as one grows in years, when the 52 mind retains its subtlety, but is conscious of increasing languor, than to test the one and brace the other by companionship with a book familiar and frequently re-read: we walk thereby with a supporting staff, stroll leaning upon a friendly arm. This is what Horace does for us: coming back to him in our old age, we recover our youthful selves, and are relieved to learn while we appreciate afresh his well-remembered lines, that if our minds have become more inert, they are also more feeling, than of yore." For full justification of these graceful amenities we must turn to the lyrical poems. The Satires and Epistles, as their author frequently reminds us, were in prose: the revealed Horatian secret, the condensed expression of the Horatian charm, demanded musical verse; and this we have in the Odes and Epodes. The word Ode is Greek for a Song; Epode was merely a metrical term to express an ode which alternated in longer and shorter lines, and we may treat them all alike as Odes....