1G4 HORACE as well as Greek. Its aim was to perfect the more imma ture workmanship of the former, and to adapt the forms, manners, and metres of the latter to subjects of immediate and national interest. As Virgil performed for his genera tion the same kind of office which Ennius performed for an older generation, so Horace in his Satires, and to a more limited extent in his Epistles, brought to perfection for the amusement and instruction of his contemporaries the rude but vigorous designs of Lucilius. Notwithstanding great differences in their intellectual tastes and culture, and the great differences between a time of republican freedom and one of imperial restraint, in which their respective lots were cast, there was a real affinity of temper and disposition between the first and the second in the line of the great Roman satirists. Horace seems to have made Lucilius to some extent his model, in his manner of life as well as in the form and substance of his satire. We find in the fragments of Lucilius expressions of a love of freedom and independ ence, of indifference to wealth or public employment, of joy at escaping from the storms of life into a quiet haven, of contentment with his own lot, of the superiority of plain living to luxury, identical in spirit and often similar in manner to those that are almost the common-places of Horace. It was the example of Lucilius which induced Horace to commit all his private thoughts, feelings, and experience " to his books as to trusty companions," and also to com ment freely on the characters and lives of other men. Many of the subjects of particular satires of Horace were immediately suggested by those treated by Lucilius. Thus the "Journey to Briindusium" reproduced the outlines of Lucilius s " Journey to the Sicilian Straits." The discourse of Ofella on luxury was founded on a similar discourse of Lselius on gluttony, and the " Banquet of Nasidienus " may have been suggested by the description by the older poet of a rustic entertainment. The same kinds of excess are satirizsd by both, especially the restless passion of money- making and the sordid anxieties of money^saving, and the opposite extreme of profuse and ostentatious expenditure. There was more of moral censure and personal aggressive ness in the satire of the older poet. The ironical temper of Horace induced him to treat the follies of society in the spirit of a humorist and man of the world, rather than to assail vice with the severity of a censor ; and the greater urbanity of his age or of his disposition restrained in him the direct personality of satire. The names introduced by him to mark types of character, such as Nomentanus, Maenius, Fantolabus, &c., are reproduced from the writings of the older poet. Horace also followed Lucilius in the variety of forms which his satire assumes, and especially in the frequent adoption of the form of dialogue, derived from the " dramatic medley" which was the original character of the Roman Satura. This form suited the spirit in which Horace regarded the world, and also the dramatic quality of his genius, just as the direct denunciation and elaborate painting of character suited the "sseva indignatio" and the oratorical genius of Juvenal. Horace s satire is accordingly to a great extent a repro duction in form, manner, substance, and tone of the satire of Lucilius; or rather it is a casting in the mould of Lucilius of his own observation and experience. There is little trace of the influence of his Greek studies either in the matter or the manner of this thoroughly Roman work ; though he mentions in one passage that, as aids to composition, he had carried with him to the country the works of Archi- lochus, and of the comic poets Eupolis, Plato, and Menander. But a comparison of the fragments of Lucilius with the finished compositions of Horace brings out in the strongest light the artistic originality and skill of the latter poet in his management of metre and style. Nothing can be rougher and harsher than the hexameters of Lucilius, or cruder than his expression. In his management of the more natural trochaic metre, he has shown much greater ease and simplicity. It is one great triumph of Horace s genius that he was the first and indeed the only Latin writer who could bend the stately hexameter to the uses of natural and easy, and, at the same time, terse and happy conversational style. Catullus, in his henclecasyllabics, had shown the vivacity with which that light and graceful metre could be employed in telling some short story or describing some trivial situation dramatically. But no one before Horace had succeeded in applying the metre of heroic verse to the uses of common life. But he had one great native model in the mastery of a terse, refined, ironical, and natural conversational style, Terence ; and the Satires show, not only in allusions to incidents and personages, but in many happy turns of expression very frequent traces of Horace s familiarity with the works of the Roman Menander. The Epistles are more original in form, more philosophic in spirit, more finished in style than the Satires. The form of composition may have been suggested by that of some of the satires of Lucilius, which were composed as letters to his personal friends. But letter-writing in prose, and occasionally also in verse, had been common among the Romans from the time of the siege of Corinth ; and a practice originating in the wants and convenience of friends temporarily separated from one another by the public service was ultimately cultivated as a literary accomplish ment. It was a happy idea of Horace to adopt this form for his didactic writings on life and literature. It suited him as an eclectic and not a systematic thinker, and as a friendly counsellor rather than a formal teacher of his age. It suited his circumstances in the latter years of his life, when his tastes inclined him more to retirement and study, while he yet wished to retain his hold on society and to extend his relations with younger men who were rising into eminence. It suited the class who cared for literature, a limited circle of educated men, intimate with one another, and sharing the same tastes and pursuits. While giving expression to lessons applicable to all men, he in this way seems to address each reader individually, "admissus circum praecordia ludit," with a subtle power of sympathy and of inspiring sympathy, which respects both himself and his reader. In spirit the Epistles are more ethical and medi tative than the Satires. Like the Odes they exhibit the twofold aspects of his philosophy, that of temperate Epicu reanism and that of more serious and elevated conviction. In the actual maxims which he lays down, in his apparent belief in the efficacy of addressing philosophical texts to the mind, he exemplifies the triteness and limitation of all Roman thought. But the spirit and sentiment of his practical philosophy is quite genuine and original. The individuality of the great Roman moralists, such as Lucretius and Horace, appears not in any difference in the results at which they have arrived, but in the difference of spirit with which they regard the spectacle of human life. In reading Lucretius we are impressed by his earnest ness, his pathos, his elevation of feeling; in Horace we are charmed by the serenity of his temper and the flavour of a delicate and subtle wisdom. We note also in the Epistles the presence of a more philosophic spirit, not only in the expression of his personal convictions and aims, but also in his comments on society. In the Satires he paints the outward effects of the passions of the age. He shows us prominent types of character the miser, the parasite, the legacy-hunter, the parvenu, &c., but he does not try to trace these different manifestations of life to their source. In the Epistles he finds the secret spring of the social vices
of the age in the desire, as marked in other times as in
