From these early associations he was prepared to enjoy the conversation and ways of his country neighbours in the Sabine highlands as a welcome change from the society of statesmen and men of letters in the metropolis. His childhood and boyhood passed among the Apulian yeomen must have aided in developing those intellectual gifts and moral tendencies which fitted him to be the genial satirist of his age.

Another, and quite different gift, he seems first to have become conscious of in the early years passed near Venusia. He has, like the other great Italian poets, a genuine love of Nature. This susceptibility manifests itself in him in a way peculiar to himself and is discernible in the earliest impressions made by outward objects on his imagination. In Horace, the love of nature is shown in the vividness of impression produced by particular scenes1, and by the hold which these scenes gained on his affections. The earliest trace of this definiteness of perception is seen in the familiar passage of the fourth Ode of the third book, in which, with more probably of fancy than of actual memory, he tells the story of the adventure which marked him out as a poetic child,'

Non sine dis animosus infans.

In such graphic touches as 'celsae nidum Acherontiae,' ' arvum pingue humilis Forenti,' we note the individual distinctness of the impressions made on his mind. The affection for particular places which he shows in later life, in his mention of Tibur, Lucretilis, the stream Digentia, and the fountain of Bandusia, seems to have been first awakened by the great natural objects by which his childhood was surrounded; such as the 'impetuous' and 'loud-sounding' Aufidus, whose name he more than once associates with his hope of immortality, the Monte Voltore and the 'Venusian woods' which clothed its sides, and the range of Apulian hills whose familiar outlines he

1 Besides many vivid descriptive touches in the Odes, cf. such phrases as 'saxis late candentibus Anxur,' ' rugosus frigore pagus,' from the Satires and Epistles.

recognises in his journey to Brundisium. The name of the fountain, whose sound charmed his ear in his poetical meridian, and which he has made as famous as the names of the fountains haunted by the Muses on Helicon and Parnassus, was probably transferred by him from a fountain in the neighbourhood of his early home to that which charmed his ear and fancy in later life.

The most important moral influence of his early years was that exercised on his character by the worth, sagacity, and pious devotion of his father. We hear of no other members of his family; and the fact that his father was able to make him the exclusive object of his care, to accompany him to Rome, and to leave him means sufficient to support him in the station in which he was educated, suggests the inference that he was an only son and that he lost his mother in his early years. The attachment between himself and his father is of the kind often found subsisting between father and son when they are the sole surviving members of their race. After Horace had enjoyed the intimacy of the best men of his day, he looks back to his father's influence as one of the happiest circumstances of his life, and attributes to his precepts and example whatever claim. he had to moral worth and social attraction. To the same influence he ascribes the intellectual habit of observing and judging character. To his care also he owed the advantage of the highest education which Rome could give, and the provision of the means which enabled him to complete his studies at Athens. The original position of his father appears to have been that of a public slave of the town of Venusia; and it is supposed that he owed the ancient patrician name of Horatius to the fact that Venusia was included in the Horatian tribe. Horace was himself 'ingenuus '-i.e. born after his father had obtained his emancipation. His father had first held the post of 'coactor,' or collector of money at public auctions. From the scanty emoluments of this post, combined with other business, he saved enough to become the owner of the small farm in the neighbourhood of Venusia where the poet probably was born. Though careful and thrifty like the best type of the

Italian yeoman, he was free from the narrowness of self-made men, and while preparing his son for a career more suitable to the promise of his genius than likely to advance him in the race for wealth, he inculcated upon him the wisdom of being content with the provision he had himself made for him. To his training Horace attributes his exemption from the meanness and avarice of which he is so caustic an observer, as well as his immunity from the more ruinous vices of a corrupt society. Not satisfied with sending him to the school at Venusia where the sons of the provincial magnates were educated, he gave up his own occupation, took him to Rome, acted there as his attendant, enabled him to appear like the sons of men of old hereditary estate, and procured for him the best instruction which Rome could provide. He became the companion, guide, and friend of his son; and imparted to him the lessons on human life drawn from his own experience. There is scarcely any individual portrait in all ancient literature which leaves on the mind so real an impression of worth, affection, and good sense, as this picture of the poet's father. It reminds us of the peasant fathers of two men of genius in modern times, Burns and Carlyle; of the serious sense of duty in the one and his reverence for the 'traditus ab antiquis mos;' of the other's habit of shrewd and caustic observation on the lives and characters of his neighbours. The admiration which these men of genius had for the homely worth and sagacity of their fathers is exactly like that which Horace expresses for his peasant father. There are no passages in his writings, among those in which Horace speaks of and from himself, which afford surer evidence of the soundness of his heart and the true metal out of which his character was tempered, than those in which he recalls with candour and pride the debt which he owed his father. The vein of genius which made him one of the great poets of the world, is one of the incommunicable gifts—

θεῶν ἐρικυδέα δῶρα

ὅσσα κεν αὐτοὶ δῶσιν, ἑκὼν δ ̓ οὐκ ἄν τις ἕλοιτο

but the grain of character which saved him from becoming the

slave of society or of the pleasures to which the mobility and geniality of his temperament exposed him, was clearly his by inheritance.

At Rome he received the ordinary literary education under the severe discipline of Orbilius, one of the line of famous grammarians and schoolmasters, dating from the time of Lucilius, to whose writings and teaching much of the definiteness and clearness of Latin style is to be attributed. A line from Domitius Marsus, preserved in a fragment of Suetonius,

Si quos Orbilius ferula scuticaque cecidit—

justifies the epithet 'plagosus' applied by Horace to his old schoolmaster. In him, according to the account of Suetonius and Macrobius (ii. 6. 3), Horace had a living example of the caustic and censorious freedom of speech which he admired in Lucilius. Orbilius taught with 'more reputation than remuneration,' and wrote a book on the wrongs which schoolmasters suffered at the hands of parents.' If Horace received any literary impulse from him, it was probably towards satire rather than artistic poetry. The school-book which he mentions in connexion with the teaching he received at Rome is the 'poems of Livius Andronicus,' probably his Latin translation of the Odyssey, the retention of which as a text-book in education in the Ciceronian age is a proof of Roman conservatism in educational as in other matters. But Horace received also, before he left Rome, some direct initiation into Greek literature and some knowledge of the Iliad. The object of the higher schooleducation during the last half-century of the Republic was to impart an intelligent mastery of Latin and Greek; to enable the pupil to become in after-life 'doctus sermones utriusque linguae.' Horace was familiar with, though he did not greatly value, most of the old Latin poets, and through all his life was a diligent student of the whole range of Greek poetry from Homer to Menander.

The crown of a liberal education in that age was to pass some years at Athens, which attracted the youth of Rome by

the spell of its memories and the fame of its living teachers, and afforded them the combined advantages which a visit to the old seats of art and letters, and residence at a great University, afford to a modern Englishman. But these advantages were not accessible to every one; and it must have been quite an exceptional thing for a man of Horace's birth and means to share in the life led there by the younger members of the Roman aristocracy. The enthusiasm for intellectual culture, and the ambition to live with people of distinction, were through all his life powerful motives with Horace; and he was influenced by both motives in completing his education at Athens. The intellectual gains which he attributed to his stay there were an advance in literary accomplishment,

Adiecere bonae paulo plus artis Athenae,

and his first introduction to the questions of ethical philosophy, which occupied much of his attention in his later years. It was probably at this time that he became an admirer of Archilochus and the old lyrical poets with whom his own earliest lyrical poems indicate long familiarity. He tells us that his earliest literary ambition was by the composition of Greek verses to be numbered among Greek poets, till warned from so preposterous a purpose by what he poetically calls a vision of Romulus, but what prosaically may be regarded as the suggestion of his own common sense and national feeling. Yet this early attempt to catch the melodies of the old Greek lyrical poets in their own language may have prepared him for that mastery over musical effect and poetical expression which he afterwards attained; just as their exercises in Latin or Italian verse trained the most classic of our English poets to their consummate mastery of metre and diction. One negative advantage he gained from the completion of his studies at Athens instead of under Greek teachers at Rome, that he escaped the influence of Alexandrinism, under which all the other contemporary poets were educated. But Athens was to him a school of life and social pleasure as well as of literary and