one whose heart in realising its deepest happiness was not unmoved by natural piety. Through his patriotic sentiment and his love of Nature and poetry, the ironical singer of the lighter joys of life is capable of feeling something of the solemn enthusiasm and reverential piety of Virgil. But if in certain moods he may seem to share in the religious feelings and beliefs of Virgil, in other moods he is nearer to the attitude of Lucretius. He, too, may claim a rank among philosophical poets, and the attitude towards human life which he maintains depends in a great degree on his philosophical conceptions. The Epistles present him to us rather as a man in search of a philosophical creed than, like Lucretius, the consistent and polemical upholder of a definite one. And it was natural that in his lyrical poetry he should let himself be swayed by conflicting sympathies, and see in opposite theories of life and actual ways of living some side of truth which moved his imagination or stirred his lighter fancy. There is a serious and impassioned side to his philosophy, in which we recognise the countryman of Lucretius, the inheritor of the masculine traditions of Rome. There is another side to it in which we seem to recognise the disciple of Aristippus, and the sympathetic student of Anacreon, Mimnermus and Menander. He was in contact with the life of his age at too many points to reduce it to a formula. As a poet he aims at vividly realising various situations in life; as a moralist he feels that the condition of happiness and consistency of character is to understand rightly each situation, and to meet it as it should be met. His philosophy is based on observation of life, more than on any speculative conception. But as Lucretius under the conception of Nature' declares his belief in the omnipotence of law in the world, and Virgil in personifying the Fates implies his belief in the firm decrees of Providence, the thought ever present to the mind of Horace is the uncertainty in human affairs, which he personifies under the name of Fortune, and the limit imposed on all effort and all enjoyment by the inevitable certainty of death, which he personifies as Necessitas. The aspect of irony in human affairs which Lucretius speaks of as the 'vis abdita quaedam 1,' and Tacitus as the 'ludibria rerum humanarum,' presents itself to the imagination of Horace as a personal power Fortuna saevo laeta negotio. In his conception of man's relation to this power there is an ethical grandeur in which he seems to rise to the level of Lucretius. Two lessons he learns from this aspect of life; the necessity of each man's absolute dependence on himself, and the necessity of limiting his desires. To be master of oneself, and to find happiness in simple pleasures, are the lessons which Horace draws from his philosophy. So far as there is any difference between Lucretius and Horace in the way in which these lessons are apprehended, they seem to come to the former like a new revelation, to the latter like old familiar truths. There is thus more of reverential awe in the tones of Lucretius, more of a stately calm in those of Horace. The sapphic stanza of Horace Non enim gazae neque consularis can express the familiar thought of the impotence of pomp and state to secure peace of mind, with as much grandeur and elevation, if with less passionate vehemence, than the hexameters of Lucretius Re veraque metus hominum curaeque sequaces In another place where Horace treads in the footsteps of 1 Linquenda tellus et domus et placens v. 1233: Usque adeo res humanas vis abdita quaedam Opterit, et pulchros fascis saevasque secures Proculcare ac ludibrio sibi habere videtur. which may be compared with Iam iam non domus accipiet te laeta neque uxor there is a profounder pathos in the older poet, a calmer resignation in the younger. There is an austerer consolation also in Lucretius. He puts aside the fear of death by the power of thought, by the sense of reconcilement with the universal law of Nature. Horace, in one mood, draws from the thought of death the lesson to intensify the enjoyment of the present, almost in the spirit of those whose maxim, 'brevis hic est fructus homullis,' Lucretius treats with such austere scorn. But he approaches Lucretius in such passages as the Quod adest memento Componere aequus, in which the same true and serious meaning may be read as in the lines Sed quia semper aves quod abest, praesentia temnis Horace had a more real sympathy with the social and pleasureloving side of Epicureanism than Lucretius. The sense of man's limitation tends, in Horace, to lower the higher energies of life Quid brevi fortes iaculamur aevo while Lucretius holds that life with all its limitations and imperfections still affords sufficient scope 'dignam dis degere vitam.' Yet if we recognise in the philosophy of Lucretius a loftier power of contemplation, and a more austere courage resulting from it, the philosophy of Horace can invest the practical duties and the wise regulation of life with poetic charm and dignity. By being less consistent in his philosophy, Horace is truer to the conditions of human life. He has no rigid rule of logic to apply to the varying circumstances. A vein of natural Stoicism, inherited from the old Sabellian stock, and a sympathetic appreciation of the great practical qualities manifested in the best Roman statesmen and soldiers of all times, temper the Epicureanism natural to his social temper, his poetical tastes, and the pleasure which he found in nature, in human society, in art and poetry. His true ideal is not the Stoic, renouncing all the amenities, nor the Epicurean, renouncing the practical duties of life; not the contemplative thinker, nor the man who achieves success in the world of action, nor the man of pleasure, but the man who can temperately enjoy all the blessings of life and yet be independent of them, who performs public duties with capacity and integrity and yet is free from personal ambition, who is ready if called upon to sacrifice his life for his country and his friends. One of the latest utterances of his philosophy is in the Ode to Lollius, where, after paying a tribute to the supposed rectitude and capacity of the person addressed, he sketches an ideal in which the best qualities of the Epicurean and the Stoic are united to those of the patriot and the man of honour Non possidentem multa vocaveris Nomen beati, qui Deorum Duramque callet pauperiem pati Non ille pro caris amicis Aut patria timidus perire (iv. 9). He has that sense of the dignity of human life which is so marked a characteristic of Lucretius and Virgil, of Cicero and Tacitus, but he has a less profound sense of its pathos than either Lucretius or Virgil. With them the pathos of human life is felt in the severance of the ties of family affection; in Horace it is felt in the thought of the eternal banishment of each living individual from the scene of his transitory enjoyment— Omnes eodem cogimur, omnium Sors exitura et nos in aeternum Exilium impositura cymbae (ii. 3). Thus Horace represented in his poetry the graver interests of his time-the national sentiment in its most intense and exalted movement, the religious revival both in its national and its artistic significance, the serious thoughts on the conduct of life which the condition of society, the career of individuals, and his own experience and reflexion impressed upon him. Among Roman poets he holds a middle position between Virgil and Lucretius on the one hand, and the elegiac poets and Martial, whose poetry simply aims at giving pleasure, on the other. Horace ranks both among the 'sacri vates,' who interpret the deeper meaning of life, and among the poets who take the transient lights and shadows of their time as the theme of their art. If not the most representative poet of his country, for that title belongs to the author of the Georgics and the Aeneid, he is the most many-sided. It is not necessary to find with Mr. Verrall that his Melpomene is the Muse of Tragedy, to recognise that his great value among the poets of the world consists in the completeness and variety of his representation: and in this completeness and variety is included his capacity of interpreting the tragic element in national history and in the career of individuals, and his sense of whatever in the men of his own age or in the records and supernatural beliefs of the past added dignity and elevation to life, as well as the wit and gaiety with which he has idealised the 'fugitiva gaudia' of a refined society, loving pleasure both from natural temperament and as an escape from anxious cares and painful memories. There is a third function of his lyrical art, in which it becomes his own individual voice, expressing his sympathy with and appreciation of his friends, and giving utterance to what was deepest in his own personal feelings. IV. To a large class of his admirers Horace is best known as the Anacreontic singer of the pleasures of love and wine; and it is in the lighter poems dealing with these themes that they |