bitious of being esteemed an immortal god, in cold blood leaped into burning Ætna.[1] Let poets have the privilege and license to die [as they please]. He who saves a man against his will, does the same with him who kills him [against his will]. Neither is it the first time that he has behaved in this manner; nor, were he to be forced from his purposes, would he now become a man, and lay aside his desire of such a famous death. Neither does it appear sufficiently, why he makes verses: whether he has defiled his father's ashes, or sacrilegiously removed the sad enclosure[2] of the vindictive thunder: it is evident that he is mad, and like a bear that has burst through the gates closing his den, this unmerciful rehearser chases the learned and unlearned. And whomsoever he seizes, he fastens on and assassinates with recitation: a leech that will not quit the skin, till satiated with blood.[3]
THE END.
- ↑ Ardentem frigidus Ætnam insiluit. "In cold blood, deliberately." Horace, by playing on the words ardentum frigidus, would show that he did not believe the story, and told it as ono of the traditions, which poets may use without being obliged to vouch tho truth of them. The pleasantry continues, when he says, it is murder to hinder a poet from killing himself; a maxim, which could not be said seriously. San.
- ↑ An triste bidental What crime must that man have committed whom the gods in vengeance have possessed with a madness of writing verses? Bidental was a place struck with lightning, which the aruspices purified and consecrated with a sacrifice of a sheep, bidental. It was an act of sacrilege ever to remove tho bounds of it, movere bidental. Fran.
- ↑ In concluding the annotations on the Art of Poetry, I must beg to recommend to the reader's notice my translation of Aristotle's Poetic, with a collection of notes, as the two treatises contribute to each other's illustration in the fullest extent.
