of his style. The longest quotation, a definition of virtus in thirteen verses, is not without dignity of thought and expression, but in general the criticism of Horace, that Lucilius wrote too freely and with too little attention to finish of style, seems to be justified. The loss of his writings is a loss to linguistic and literary history, rather than to literature itself. But he performed the great service of determining both the tone and the form of satire. He gave to it for all time that critical and censorious tone which is still associated with the name and, after considerable experiment with other verse forms which had been used by Ennius, he settled upon the hexameter as the most suitable meter. In selecting satire as his field, Horace therefore felt himself bound by all the force of strong tradition to a certain tone and a certain verse.

But the force of tradition and convention in ancient literature, strong as it was, did not preclude originality; it merely set the bounds within which originality might work. Of imitation, in any proper sense of the word, that is, of attempt to copy as closely as possible the work of an older writer, there is very little evidence in Greek or Latin literature, and Horace, setting himself to write Lucili ritu, as he says, accepting as his starting point the definition which Lucilius had given to satire, was also acutely conscious of the imperfections of his predecessor, and fully determined to avoid them in his own work. The most evident of these imperfections was in the matter of style. The fragments of the satires of Lucilius are bold and crude in expression; they say what was to be said, but they say it without charm. There is no evidence of care for workmanship, of pleasure in attractive expression. But between Lucilius and Horace was the great Ciceronian period, in which the whole subject of Latin style in prose and in verse was most warmly debated by men who were daily practicing the art of writing. Two generations had contributed to raise the standard of good style, and Horace and the friends with whom he lived were

desirous of raising it still further. Horace was, besides, by nature a literary artist, to whom the shaping of phrases into effective and pleasing form was an end in itself. It is, indeed, surprising to a modern reader that the justice of his guarded and moderate criticisms of the style of Lucilius should have been questioned by any intelligent student of Latin literature in the Augustan Age. That he was entirely successful in his attempt to improve in respect to style upon the work of his predecessor has never been doubted.

The other direction in which Horace endeavored to surpass Lucilius, without deviating too widely from the type, led him into greater difficulties. The satire of Lucilius was undoubtedly pungent and bitter in its attacks upon persons and upon parties, and this savageness of tone, which in various forms was familiar and agreeable to the Romans, was, in fact, an essential element in satire of the Lucilian type. But it was in every way impossible in the Augustan Age; the political situation between 42 and 31 B.C. would not have borne rough handling, and the softening of manners had put a check upon personalities. The problem, therefore, which presented itself to Horace was to retain the pungency of individual criticism without violation of the canons of good taste and without offense to public men. A part of the problem he made no attempt to solve; he left politics out of his satire entirely, even at the time when his patriotic feeling was expressing itself in the Epode quo, quo scelesti ruitis? and in Epode 16. But to the problem of giving to his satire the appearance without the reality of personal attack, he addressed himself with much ingenuity. The Satires seem to bristle with proper names, but examination shows that only a very few of the allusions are in fact personal attacks. Many of the names are taken from Lucilius and had long since ceased to be anything but types in literature. Others are from the Ciceronian period, the names of men who were then notorious.

Still others, men of Horace's day, were in their lifetime already so much the subject of open gossip and comment that an allusion to them was no more properly offensive or, indeed, personal, than an allusion in a modern newspaper to the men whose names are upon everybody's lips. Many names are fictitious, some pure inventions like the names in a novel, others disguising an allusion to a real person. The residuum of actual personality, such as would be offensive to modern feeling, is extremely small. Direct attack upon an individual was, in fact, as little to Horace's taste as to our own, and was incompatible with the lightness of touch which he was endeavoring to attain. Even the semblance of severity, which the Lucilian tradition obliged him to maintain in his earlier work, grows less distinct as he becomes conscious of his peculiar powers. The Second Book has less of it than the First ; indeed, the first satire of that book is a kind of travesty of the severely personal satire and, by implication, a renunciation of it. The place of Horace in the history of Roman satire is, it is true, in the line of succession from Lucilius, but his own contribution to that history amounts almost to the creation of a new literary genre, a new variety of satire.

The events in the life of Horace after the publication of the Epodes and the Second Book in 30 B.C. are of interest to the reader of the Satires only in so far as they interpret his earlier period. He turned at once from satire to lyric poetry, following still further the path upon which he had entered in the Epodes, and published in 23 B.C. the first three books of the Odes, to which he gave the best of his powers and the best years of his life. Aside from other and more determining motives, the inner impulse and the fact that the lyric is a higher form of art than satire, - the choice doubtless indicates also a feeling that he had for the time exhausted the field of satire, that he had carried his modifications of the Lucilian type as far as it was possible for him to carry them. But the habit of observation

was still strong in him, and after the publication of the Odes he resumed his commentary on life and society in the form of epistles in hexameter. By the choice of a new and different form he freed himself from the limitations of satire; at the same time, as the tradition of the epistle in verse was less definitely fixed, the new form did not hamper him. The interval that separates such a satire as 2, 6 from such an epistle as 1, 7 is very slight; by addressing the satire to Maecenas, he could easily have made it an epistle in form, and with a few modifications the epistle might have been published with the Satires. It might be said that the three collections of hexameter poetry represent three steps in a continuous process; the First Book of the Satires is, in the main, satire after the manner of Lucilius, the Second Book is an experiment with the dialogue form, and the First Book of the Epistles marks the complete breaking away from the Lucilian tradition. They are three stages in the working out of a literary form within which the temperament of Horace could express itself with the least possible sense of restriction.

Before his death, which occurred on the 27th of November, 8 B.C., Horace was already recognized as the greatest of Roman lyric poets and as the most conspicuous figure, next to Vergil, in the literature of his time. This position his poems retained after his death; they were universally read and were used as text-books in schools. Critical and learned commentary began to gather about them in the first century of the Empire, and, before the fall of Roman power in the West, copies of his works were in wide circulation, often prefaced by the account of his life from Suetonius and annotated with scholia. During the Middle Ages, when knowledge of the ancient world was at its lowest, his poems were still read in schools and frequently copied in the monastery libraries, and with the Revival of Learning many editions were issued from the early printing presses. In modern times they have formed a part of the

school or university curriculum in all countries; they have been translated more often than the works of any other ancient writer, and have deeply influenced modern literature. All this is evidence of the high esteem in which his poetry has been held by scholars and men of letters; the estimate of men of affairs, of men outside of academic life, is somewhat similar. For it is probably true that of all the writers of Greek and Latin poetry — many of them greater than Horace no one has so frequently been carried away from the university life and become a part of the familiar intellectual furniture of educated men in active life. The explanation of an interest so widespread and so long-continued is not, of course, to be sought in those qualities or characteristics which Horace shares with other writers. He reflects, it is true, a highly interesting period in history, but the letters of Cicero are an even more vivid reflection of a more critical period. His poetic form, as it is worked out in the lyrics, is most admirable, and poetic form is one of the main reasons for our continued study of the two classic literatures, but the range of its attractive power is limited. That which has differentiated Horace from other writers and made him permanently attractive to men of widely varied taste is independent of his circumstances and, to a considerable degree, of his artistic form; it lies partly in the personal character which his writings disclose and partly in the permanent worth of his comments upon life.

The character of a writer or an artist as it shows itself in his work must be learned by indirection, by impressions repeated and deepened into familiarity. For this kind of personal acquaintance Horace gives abundant material. Enough has been said above to correct the notion that he was a dilettante, playing with life. He was, it is true, fundamentally an observer rather than an actor, and he was by temperament genial and tolerant; these are the qualities upon which the charm of his personality rests; but a merely temperamental tolerance is, like tempera