Excerpt from Works of Horace: With English Notes, Critical and Explanatory

Archy, disguised indeed, but not, therefore, the less arbitrary; while his acquaintance, and cyan his intimate friends, cxtendiag through almost every gradation of society, show the same influences, as they affect persons of different characters, talents, or station. Horace is exactly in that happy intermediate rank which connects both ex tremes. His poems are inscribed to Agrippa or Mmcenas, even to the emperor himself, to his humbler private friend, or to his bailiff. He unites in the same way, the literary with the social life; ha shows the station assumed by or granted to more men of lettcrg when the orator in the senate or in the forum coded his place to the agreeable writer; the man who excited or composed at his will the strong passions of the Roman people, had lost his occupation and his power, which devolved, as far as the literary part of his fame, upon the popular author. The mingling intellectual elements blend to. Gather, oven in more singular union, in the mind of the poet. Gre cian education and tastes have not polished off the old Roman indo pondence; the imitator of Greek forms of verse writes the purest vernacular Latin; the Epicurean philosophy has not subdued his masculine shrewdness and good sense to dreaming indolence. In the Roman part of his character he blends some reminiscence of the sturdy virtue of the Sabine or Apulian mountaineers with the refined manners of the city. All the great men of his day are the familiam of the poet; not in their hours of state alone, but in the ease of ao cial intercourse: we become acquainted with their ordinary manners and habits; and are admitted to the privacy of Miscenas, of August. Tns himself, of Virgil, and of Varius. Thus the Horatian poetry is more than historical, it is the living age itself in all its varied reality. Without the biography of the poet, even without that of some of his contemporaries, the poetry of Horace can not be truly appreciated, it can hardly be understood; and by the magic of his poetry the reader is at once placed in the midst of Roman society in the Au gustan age.

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