have reached no higher appreciable value than that assigned by Wieland or Niebuhr, shall we feel no surprise that freedom so great should characterise the earlier stage of our author's intimacy? That this should be thus broadly stated in the first public announcement of that intimacy made by Horace; and in an essay which he opens by merely complimenting his patron on being too high-minded to "scorn" humble folk as such? Or that so great confidence of tone should be assumed by a young man, as modest and retiring as he was shrewd and sagacious, at the very outset of an uphill course of authorship, particularly if we suppose, with Walchnaër and other eminent moderns, that Horace had, before acquaintance began, satirised Mæcenas himself, along with others of the Cæsarean or Imperialist party? It is not at all necessary to go, with Bentley, the length of maintaining that Horace wrote, as he certainly published, the contents of his various books of Odes, Satires, and Epistles, separately and consecutively, in a certain order. Still less can we assent to Dr. Tate's dogma, that Horace, in Ser. i. 4, "says, as plainly as a man can say it, that he had not then written anything which could entitle him to the name of a poet;" the confutation of which opinion is quoted by Milman, from the Classical Museum, No. v. p. 215, to the effect that Horace elsewhere uses similar language, as in Ep. ii. 1, 111, when his reputation must have been well established. Besides, some specimens of his genius must have existed when Virgil and Varius undertook to show Mæcenas 'quid

But this is

esset,' or what manner of man he was. very certain:-First, that the first book of Satires was his first published book. Secondly, that, whatever may have been the amount of the detached pieces by which alone it is conceivable that he could then have attracted notice in any degree, and which are probably now scattered throughout his works (for we hear nothing of any works of Horace being lost), still his reputation must have been comparatively insignificant as an author, previously to the publication of the very works which have immortalized his name to succeeding ages. Thirdly, that as the battle of Philippi was fought в. c. 42, a minimum space for the known intermediate circumstances is allowed by fixing his introduction to Mæcenas at B. c. 39, and the publication in question at or about B. c. 34 or 35, and when Horace was about thirty years of age. Fourthly, that as Horace's last publication, viz., his second book of Epistles, appeared at or about B. C. 12, and the death of Mæcenas happened about B. C. 7, it follows that this supposed declaration of his familiarity with the Emperor's state-adviser must have been published within the first four years of an intimacy extending over thirty years; and in the very first of a series of publications extending over twenty-three years, and which seem necessary, according to their development, to establish the author's character. Or, finally, on the extreme supposition that the term convictor is unobjectionable, are the known social qualifications of Horace sufficient to

justify the fact, or is the sanguineness of a young writer adequate to account for the statement, that one of the humblest and most unfavourably circumstanced men in Rome had reached his maximum intimacy with the first literary patron of the day at a period when both the length of his acquaintance with that personage, and his own public authorship, were at or near a comparative minimum?

All things considered, is the term convictor more suited to the vocabulary of the coarse and envious reviler, or to that of him whom Milman supposes to have been the most sensible and the best informed man in the society in which he moved? Whether more likely to be adopted as the sneer of some disappointed sycophant, or as the suggestion of a spirit whose nobility of independence is truthfully reflected in the romantic pride of honest, muse-taught, Robert Burns? Is such the adopted designation of him respecting whom the above-mentioned biographer thus justly writes: Horace, indeed, asserted and maintained greater independence of personal character than most subjects of the new empire; there is a tone of dignity and self-respect, even in the most adulatory passages of his writings;" and again, in whom he commends deservedly a singular tact and delicacy through which the poet preserves his freedom by never trespassing beyond its proper bounds," and whose attachment to the glorious privilege of being independent,' in his refusal of a confidential office placed at his disposal by the Emperor himself, is so elegantly

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eulogised by Wieland? In another point of view, are we to suppose this boon-fellow-like epithet to be jointly applied, in a public notification, to a patron, of whom the same polished writer remarks: "Mæcenas in the mean time was winning, if not to the party, or to personal attachment towards Augustus, at least to contented acquiescence in his sovereignty, those who would yield to the silken charms of social enjoyment:" and again, "The mutual amity of all the great men of letters, in this period, gives a singularly pleasing picture of the society which was harmonized and kept together by the example and influence of Mæcenas?" Or finally, does not the immediate substitution of the term "amicum," in the expostulation with his enemies which follows this passage, seem intended as the delicate corrective of a vulgar taunt? But of the sequel to the passage more hereafter. For the present, such appear to be the questions proper to the case.

2ndly. Is it certain or probable that Horace ever was a Tribunus Militum ? If any doubt has been cast upon the affirmative of the first proposition, this will be reflected a priori in some degree upon the second. And it is here especially to be noted that-if the present passage does not establish the fact, it is morally certain that no proof of it whatsoever exists, or ever did exist. This sentence supplies the only evidence adduced by those who supply any; for quotations of the authority of biographers by biographers must be left out of the question. And

it is an extreme concession to logical technicality to imagine the remote possibility, that Suetonius and others may have rested their assertions on some independent testimony. Nor should we insist upon the circumstance of Suetonius being not only the earliest extant biographer of Horace, but also a writer so ancient as the beginning of the second century, to the extent of supposing that he probably therefore possessed peculiar sources of correct information above any that we, at this distance of time, can command. He lived at a period as remote from the age of Horace as the present time is from that of Dean Swift: and we are familiar with the fact that many statements confidently made by well-informed authors respecting that eminent character have been already disputed or disproved. Indeed, even the identity of the birth-place of the most celebrated of British Generals the illustrious Duke of Wellington-who happily still lives to receive new and unprecedented honours-might for ever have remained a topic of dispute had not the writer of these pages discovered the fact accidentally, and published the evidence.

It would be a strange assumption to suppose any reader, whose feeling of interest has led him thus far in a disputation of this nature, to be ignorant of the vast dignity and responsibility attaching to the office of a Roman Military Tribune. Every scholar knows that the command-in-chief of a Roman legion was shared by six officers so designated; and that a Roman legion on field service mustered ordina