Horace's poems are of two kinds; of one kind the Satires and Epistles, of another the Odes and Epodes. Their order and dates of publication are shown in the following table:

Let us examine first the Satires and Epistles. The word "Satire" meant originally a farrago, a medley of various topics in various styles and metres. But all early writings of this kind have perished; and the first extant Latin satirist, Lucilius, who lived in the second century B.C., devoted his pen to castigating the vices of contemporary society and of living individuals. This style of writing, together with his six-foot measure, called hexameter, was adopted by the ethical writers who followed him, Horace, Persius, Juvenal; and so gave to the word satire a meaning which it retains to-day. In more than one passage Horace recognizes Lucilius as his master, and imitates him in what is probably the earliest, certainly the coarsest and least artistic of his poems; but maturer judgement, revolting later against the censorious spirit and bad taste of the older writer, led him to abandon his model. For good taste is the characteristic of these poems; they form a comedy of manners, shooting as it flies the folly rather than the wickedness of vice: not wounding with a red-hot iron, but "just flicking with uplifted lash," Horace stands to Juvenal as Chaucer stands to Langland, as Dante to Boccaccio. His theme is life and conduct, the true path to happiness and goodness. I write sermons in sport, he says; but sermons by a fellow-sinner, not by a dogmatic pulpiteer, not by a censor or a cynic. "Conversations" we may rather call them; the polished talk of a well-bred, cultured, practised worldling, lightening while they point the moral which he ever keeps in view, by transitions, personalities, ironies, anecdotes; by perfect literary grace, by the underlying sympathy whereby wit is sublimed and softened into humour.

So he tells stories; often trivial, but redeemed by the lightness of his touch, the avoidance of redundancy, the inevitable epithets, the culminating point and finish. He illustrates the extravagance of the day by the spendthrift Clodius, who dissolved in vinegar a pearl taken from the ear of beautiful Metella (Sat. II, iii, 239), that he might enjoy drinking at one draught a million sesterces, near a thousand pounds. More than once he returns to castigation of the gluttony, which, though not yet risen to the monstrosity described by Juvenal, was invading the houses of the wealthy. He tells of two brothers—"a precious pair"—who used to breakfast daily upon nightingales: of one Maenius, who ruined himself in fieldfares (Ep. I, xv, 41). In a paper on the "Art of Dining" he accumulates ironical gastronomic maxims (Sat. II, iv): as that oblong eggs are to be preferred to round; that cabbages should be reared in dry soil; that the forelegs of a doe-hare are choice titbits; that to make a fowl tender you must plunge it alive into boiling wine and water; that oysters are best at the new moon; that prawns and snails give zest to wine; that olive oil should be mixed with pickled tunny roe, chopped herbs, and saffron. If these prescriptions are observed, he says, travestying a fine Lucretian line, the diner-out may draw near to and drink deep from the well-spring of a happy life. By contrast he paints the character of Ofellus, a farmer, whom he had known when a boy on the Apulian hills, and had visited in his old age (Sat. II, ii). Deprived of his estate after Philippi, Ofellus had rented it from its new master, working on as tenant where he had formerly been lord. "How are we worse off now?" says the gallant old fellow to his sons. "When I was rich, we lived on smoked bacon and cabbages, with perhaps a pullet or a kid if a friend dropped in; our dessert of split figs and raisins grown upon the farm. Well, we have just the same to-day. What matter that they called me 'owner' then, that a stranger is called owner now? There is no such thing as 'owner.' This man turned us out, someone else may turn him out to-morrow; his heir will do so at any rate when he dies. The farm was called mine once, it is called his to-day; it can never 'belong' to anyone except the man who works and uses it. So, my boys, keep stout hearts, and be ready to meet adversity bravely when it comes."

He lashes the legacy-hunters, who, in a time when disinclination to marriage had multiplied the number of childless old men, were becoming a curse to society; gives rules with affected seriousness for angling in a senior's hoards (Sat. II, v). Be sure you send him game, tell him often how you love him, address him by his first, what we should call his Christian, name—that tickles sensitive ears. If he offers you his will, refuse to read it, but glance sidelong at the line where the names of legatees are written. Praise his bad verses, shoulder a way for him in the streets, entreat him to cover up from cold his dear old head, make up to his housekeeper, flatter him till he bids you stop. Then when he is dead and you find yourself his heir, shed tears, spend money on his funeral, bear your honours meekly—and go on to practise upon someone else. And he throws in a sly story of a testatrix who bequeathed her money on condition that the heir should carry to the grave upon his naked shoulders her body oiled all over; he had stuck to her all her life, and she hoped to shake him off for a moment after death. He enforces the virtue of moderation and contentment from Aesop's fables, of the frog, of the daw with borrowed plumage, of the lean weasel who squeezed himself into a granary through a tiny hole, and grew so fat that he could not return; from the story of Philippus, who amused himself by enriching a poor man to the ruin of his victim's peace and happiness (Ep. I, vii, 46); and from the delightful apologue of the City and the Country Mouse (Sat. II, vi). He denounces the folly of miserliness from the example of the ant, provident in amassing store, but restful in fruition of it when amassed; reproves ill-natured judgement of one's neighbours almost in the words of Prior, bidding us be to their faults a little blind and to their virtues very kind, softening their moral blemishes as lovers and mothers euphemize a dear one's physical defects. (Sat. I, iii) "You will not listen to me?" he stops now and then to say; "I shall continue to cry on all the same until I rouse you, as the audience in the theatre did the other day" (Sat. II, iii, 60). For it seems that one Fufius, a popular actor, assumed in a tragedy the part of Trojan Ilione, whose cue was to fall asleep upon the stage until roused with a whisper of "Mother awake!" by the ghost of her dead son Deiphilus. Poor Fufius was tipsy, fell asleep in earnest, and was insensible to the ghost's appeal, until the audience, entering into the fun, unanimously shouted, "Wake up, Mother!" Some of you, I know, he goes on, will listen, even as Polemon did (Sat. II, iii, 254). Returning from a debauch, the young profligate passed the Academy where Xenocrates was lecturing, and burst riotously in. Presently, instead of scoffing, he began to hearken; was touched and moved and saddened, tore off conscience-stricken his effeminate ornaments, long sleeves, purple leggings, cravat, the garland from his head, the necklace from his throat; came away an altered and converted man. One thinks of a poem by Rossetti, and of something further back than that; for did we not hear the story from sage Mr. Barlow's lips, in our Sandford and Merton salad days?

In the earlier Satires his personalities are sometimes gross: chatterbox Fabius, scattercash Nomentanus, blear-eyed Crispinus, Hermogenes the fop, Pantolabus the trencherman, Gorgonius the goat-scented, Rufillus the pastille-perfumed, were derisive sobriquets, which, while ministering to the censoriousness of readers by names genuine or well understood, must have bitterly offended the men thus stigmatized or transparently indicated. This he admits regretfully in his later Satires, throwing some blame on a practice of his father, who when cautioning him against vice, always pointed the warning by some example from among their acquaintance. So, leaving personal satire, he turns to other topics; relates divertingly the annoyances of a journey; the mosquitoes, the frogs which croaked all night (Sat. I, v), the bad water and the ill-baked bread. Or he paints the slummy quarter of the city in which the witches held their horrible rites, and describes their cruel orgies as he peeped at them through the trees one night. Or he girds, facetiously and without the bitterness of Persius or Juvenal, at the Jews (Sat. I, v, 100), whose stern exclusiveness of faith was beginning to excite in Rome the horror vigorously expressed by Gallio in M. Anatole France's recent brilliant work. Or he delineates, on a full canvas and with the modernity which is amongst his most endearing characteristics, the "Bore" of the Augustan age. He starts on a summer morning, light-hearted and thinking of nothing at all, for a pleasant stroll along the Sacred Way (Sat. I, ix).1 A man whom he hardly knew accosts him, ignores a stiff response, clings to him, refuses to be shaken off, sings his own praises as poet, musician, dancer, presses impertinent questions as to the household and habits of Maecenas. Horace's friend Fuscus meets them; the poet nods and winks, imploring him to interpose a rescue. Cruel Fuscus sees it all, mischievously apologizes, will not help, and the shy, amiable poet walks on with his tormentor, "his ears dropped like those of an overladen ass." At last one of the bore's creditors comes up, collars him with threats, hales him to the law courts, while the relieved poet quotes in his joy from the rescue of Hector in the Iliad, "Thus Apollo bore me from the fray." In this Satire, which was admirably imitated by Swift, it always seems to me that we get Horace at his very best, his dry quaintness and his inoffensive fun. The delicacy of Roman satire died with him; to reappear in our own Augustan age with Addison and Steele, to find faint echo in the gentle preachments of Cowper, to impress itself in every page on the lambent humour, the self-accusing tolerance, the penetrative yet benignant wit of Thackeray.

Between the latest of the Satires and the earliest of the Epistles, we have to reckon an interval of something like ten years, during which had been published the Epodes and the majority of the Odes. "Epistles" his editors have agreed to entitle them; but not all of them are genuine Letters. Some are rather dedicated than written to the persons whose names they bear; some are thrown for literary purposes into epistolary form; some again are definitely and personally addressed to friends. "Sermons" he calls them himself as he called the Satires, and their motive is mostly the same; like those, they are Conversations, only with absent correspondents instead of with present interlocutors, real or imagined. He follows in them the old theme, the art of living, the happiness of moderation and contentment; preaching easily as from Rabelais' easy chair, with all the Frenchman's wit, without his grossness. And, as we read, we feel how the ten years of experience, of thought, of study, have matured his views of life, how again the labour spent during their progress on lyrical composition, with perhaps the increasing influence over his taste of Virgil's poetry, have trained his ear, mellowed and refined his style. "The Epistles of Horace," says Dean Milman, "are, with the Poem of Lucretius, the Georgics of Virgil, and perhaps the Satires of Juvenal, the most perfect and most original form of Roman verse."

Of the three letters to Maecenas, one, like the Ode we have before quoted on p. 28, is a vigorous assertion of independence. The great man, sorely sick and longing for his friend, had written peevishly (Ep. I, vii), "You said you should be absent five days only, and you stay away the whole of August." "Well—I went away because I was ill, and I remain away because in this 'undertakers' month,' as you call it in Rome, I am afraid of being worse if I go back. When cold weather comes I shall go down to the sea; then, with the first swallow, dear friend, your poet will revisit you. I love you fondly; am grateful to you every hour of my life; but if you want to keep me always by your side, you must restore to me the tender grace of vanished youth; strong lungs, thick black hair, musical voice and ringing laughter; with our common love for pretty Cinara now dead and gone." A positive sturdy refusal, not without hints that if the patron repents his benefactions or demands sacrifice of freedom in exchange for them, he had better take them back: yet a remonstrance so disarming, infused with such a blend of respect and playfulness, such wealth of witty anecdote and classical allusion, that we imagine the fretfulness of the appeased protector evaporating in admiration as he reads, the answer of affectionate apology and acceptance dictated in his pacified response.

In another inimitable letter (Ep. I, 9), as brief as this is long, he recommends his friend Septimius to Tiberius Claudius Nero, stepson of Augustus, a young man of reserved unpleasant manners, and difficult to approach. The suasive grace with which it disclaims presumption, yet pleads his own merits as a petitioner and his friend's as a candidate for favour, with its dignified deference, implied not fulsome, to the young prince's rank, have caused it to be compared with that masterpiece of delicate solicitation, St. Paul's Epistle to Philemon. It is cited by Steele in the "Spectator" as a model of epistolary tact ("Spectator," No. 493); we cannot improve upon his translation:

"Septimius, who waits on you with this, is clearly well acquainted with the place you are pleased to allow me in your friendship. For when he beseeches me to recommend him to your notice in such a manner as to be received by you, who are delicate in the choice of your friends and domestics, he knows our intimacy and understands my ability to serve him better than I do myself. I have defended myself against his ambition to be yours as long as I possibly could; but fearing the imputation of hiding my influence with you out of mean and selfish considerations, I am at last prevailed upon to give you this trouble. Thus, to avoid the appearance of a greater fault, I have put on this confidence. If you can forgive such transgression of modesty in behalf of a friend, receive this gentleman into your interests and friendship, and take it from me that he is a brave and honest man."

An epistle written and sent about the same time, possibly by the same bearer, shows Horace in an amiable light as kindly Mentor to the young Telemachi of rank who were serving on Tiberius' staff (Ep. I, iii). "Tell me, Florus, whereabouts you are just now, in snowy Thrace or genial Asia? which of you poets is writing the exploits of Augustus? how does Titius get on with his Latin rendering of Pindar? my dear friend Celsus, what is he at work upon? his own ideas, I hope, not cribs from library books. And you? are you abandoning all other allurements for the charms of divine philosophy? Tell me, too, if you have made up your quarrel with Munatius. To break the tie of brotherhood is a crime: please, please be friends with him again, and bring him with you when next you come to see me. I am fattening a calf to feast you both." Here is a dinner invitation (Ep. I, v.): "If you can put up with deal tables and a mess of greens served in a common dish, with wine five years old and not at all bad, come and sup with me, Torquatus, at sunset. We have swept up the hearth and cleaned the furniture; you may see your face reflected in cup and platter. We will have a long summer evening of talk, and you can sleep afterwards as late as you like, for to morrow is Augustus' birthday, and there will be no business in the courts. I told you the wine is good, and there is nothing like good drink. It unlocks reticence, unloads hearts, encourages the shy, makes the tongue-tied eloquent and the poor opulent. I have chosen my company well: there will be no blab to repeat our conversation out of doors. Butra and Septimius are coming, and I hope Sabinus. Just send a line to say whom you would like to have besides. Bring friends if you choose, but the weather is hot, and we must not overcrowd the rooms." It all sounds delightful, except perhaps the mess of greens; but a good Italian cook can make vegetables tempting down to the present day. I think we should all have loved to be there, as at the neat repast of Attic taste with wine, which tempted virtuous Laurence to sup with Milton. So should we like to know what called forth this pretty piece of moralizing, addressed to the poet Tibullus (Ep. I, iv). He was handsome, prosperous, popular, yet melancholy. Horace affectionately reproves him. "Dear Albius," he says, using the intimate fore-name, "Dear Albius, tell me what you are about in your pretty villa: writing delicate verses, strolling in your forest glades, with thoughts and fancies I am sure all that a good man's should be? What can you want besides the beauty, wealth, full purse, and seemly household which the gods have given you? Dear friend, I tell you what you want, contentment with the present hour. Try and imagine that each day which dawns upon you is your last; then each succeeding day will come unexpected and delightful. I practise what I preach: come and take a look at me; you will find me contented, sleek, and plump, 'the fattest little pig in Epicurus' sty.'" And he impresses the same lesson on another friend, Bullatius, who was for some reason restless at home and sought relief in travel. "What ails you to scamper over Asia or voyage among the Isles of Greece? Sick men travel for health, but you are well. Sad men travel for change, but change diverts not sadness, yachts and chaises bring no happiness; their skies they change, but not their souls who cross the sea. Enjoy the to-day, dear friend, which God has given you, the place where God has placed you: a Little Pedlington is cheerful if the mind be free from care" (Ep. I, xi).

His great friend Fuscus twits him, as Will Honeycomb twitted Mr. Spectator, with his passion for a country life (Ep. I, x). "You are a Stoic," Horace says, "your creed is to live according to Nature. Do you expect to find her in the town or in the country? whether of the two yields more peaceful nights and sweeter sleep? is a marble floor more refreshing to the eyes than a green meadow? water poured through leaden pipes purer than the crystal spring? Even amid your Corinthian columns you plant trees and shrubs; though you drive out Nature she will silently return and supplant your fond caprices. Do interpose a little ease and recreation amid the money-grubbing which confines you to the town. Money should be the servant, not the queen, the captive, not the conqueror. If you want to see a happy man, come to me in the country. I have only one thing wanting to perfect happiness, my desire for your society." Two longer letters are written to his young friend Lollius (Ep. I, ii, xviii). The first is a study of Homer, which he has been reading in the country. In the "Iliad" he is disgusted by the reckless selfishness of the leaders; in the hero of the "Odyssey" he sees a model of patient, wise endurance, and impresses the example on his friend. It is curious that the great poet of one age, reading the greater poet of another, should fasten his attention, not on the poetry, but on the ethics of his predecessor. The remaining letter is called out by Lollius' appointment as confidential secretary to some man of great consequence; an office such as Horace himself declined when offered by Augustus. The post, he says, is full of difficulty, and endangering to self-respect: the servility it exacts will be intolerable to a man so truthful, frank, and independent as his friend. Let him decline it; or, if committed, get out of it as soon as possible.

Epistles there are without a moral purpose, called forth by some special occasion. He sends his "Odes" by one Asella for presentation to Augustus, punning on the name, as representing an Ass laden with manuscripts (Ep. I, xiii). The fancy was carried out by Pope in his frontispiece to the "Dunciad." Then his doctor tells him to forsake Baiae as a winter health resort, and he writes to one Vala, who lives in southern Italy, inquiring as to the watering places lower down the coast (Ep. I, xv). He must have a place where the bread is good and the water pure; the wine generous and mellow; in the market wild boars and hares, sea-urchins and fine fish. He can live simply at home, but is sick now and wants cherishing, that he may come back fat as one of the Phaeacians—luxurious subjects, we remember, of King Alcinous in the "Odyssey,"

Good food we love, and music, and the dance,

Garments oft changed, warm baths, and restful beds.

Odyssey, viii, 248.