Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 2.djvu/536

522 the poetic and conventional faith in the gods with decent respect, but with no depth of devotion. There is more sincerity in a sort of vague sense of the providential government, to which he attributes his escape from some of the perils of his life, his flight from Philippi, his preservation from a wolf in the Sabine wood [Carm. i. 22. 9), and from the falling of a tree in his own grounds. {Carm. ii. 13. 1 7, 27, iii. 8. 6.) In another well-known passage, he professes to have been startled into religious emo- tion, and to have renounced a godless philosophy, from hearing thunder in a cloudless sky.

The philosophy of Horace was, in like manner, that of a man of the world. He playfully alludes to his Epicureanism, but it was practical rather than speculative Epicureanism. His mind, indeed, was not in the least speculative. Common life wisdom was his study, and to this he brought a quickness of observation, a sterling common sense, and a passionless judgment, which have made his works the delight and the unfailing treasure of felicitous quotation to practical men.

The love of Horace for the country, and his in- tercourse with the sturdy and uncorrupted Sabine peasantry, seems to have kept alive an honest free- dom and boldness of thought ; while his familiarity with the great, his delight in good society, main- tained that exquisite urbanity, that general amenity, that ease without forwardness, that re- spect without servility, which induced Shaftesbury to call him the most gentlemanlike of the Roman poets.

In these qualities lie the strength and excellence of Horace as a poet. His Odes want the higher in- spirations of lyric verse — the deep religious senti- ment, the absorbing personality, the abandonment to overpowering and irresistible emotion, the unstudied haiTOony of thought and language, the absolute unity of imagination and passion which belongs to the noblest lyric song. His amatory verses are ex- quisitely graceful, but they have no strong ardour, no deep tenderness, nor even much of light and joyous gaiety. But as works of refined art, of the most skilful felicities of language and of measure, of translucent expression, and of agreeable images, embodied in words which imprint themselves in- delibly on the memory, they are unrivalled. Accord- ing to Quintilian, Horace was almost the only Roman lyric poet worth reading.

As a satirist Horace is without the lofty moral indignation, the fierce vehemence of invective, which characterised the later satirists. In the Epodes there is bitterness provoked, it should seem, by some per- sonal hatred, or sense of injury, and the ambition of imitating Archilocus ; but in these he seems to have exhausted all the malignity and violence of his temper. In the Satires, it is the folly rather than the wickedness of vice, which he touches with such playful skill. Nothing can surpass the keenness of his observation, or his ease of expression : it is the finest comedy of manners, in a descriptive instead of a dramatic form. If the Romans had been a theatrical people, and the age of Augustus a dra- matic age, Horace, as far at least as the perception of character, would have been an exquisite dra- matic writer.

But the Epistles are the most perfect of the Horatian poetry — the poetry of manners and society, the beauty of which consists in a kind of ideality of common sense and practical wisdom. The Epistles of Horace are with the Poem of Lucretius, the Georgics of Virgil, and per- haps the Satires of Juvenal, the most perfect and most original form of Roman verse. The title of the Art of Poetry for the Epistle to the Pisos, is as old as Quintilian, but it is now agreed that it was not intended for a complete theory of the poetic art. Wieland's very probable notion that it was intended to dissuade one of the younger Pisos from devoting himself to poetry, for which he had little genius, or at least to suggest the difficulties of attaining to perfection, was anticipated by Colman in the preface to his trans- lation. (Colman's Works, vol. iii. ; compare Wie- land's Horazens Brmfe^ ii. 185.)

The works of Horace became popular very soon. In the time of Juvenal they were, with the poems of Virgil, the common school book. (Juv. Sat. vii. 227.)

The chronology of the Horatian poems is of great importance, as illustrating the life, the times, and the writings of the poet. The earlier attempts by Tan. Faber, by Dacier, and by Masson, in his elaborate Vie d''IIrace, to assign each poem to its particular year in the poet's life, were crushed by the dictatorial condemnation of Bentley, who in his short preface laid down a scheme of dates, both for the composition and the publication of each book. The authority of Bentley has been in ge- neral acquiesced in by English scholars. The late Dr. Tate, with admiration approaching to idolatry, almost resented every departure from the edict oiF his master ; and in his Horatius Restituius published the whole works in the order established by Bentley. Mr. Fynes Clinton, though in general favouring the Bentleian chronology, admits that in some cases his dates are at variance with facts. [Fasti Hellenici^ vol. iii. p. 219.) Nor were the first attempts to overthrow the Bentleian chronology by Sanadon and others (Jani's was almost a translation of Masson 's life) successful in shaking the arch-critic's au- thority among the higher class of scholars.

Recently, hov/ever, the question has been re- opened with extraordinary activity by the con- tinental scholars. At least five new and complete schemes have been framed, which attempt to assign a precise period almost to every one of the poems of Horace. 1, Quaestiones Horatianae, a C. Kirch- ner. Lips. 1834. 2. Histoire de la Vie et dea Poesies d''IIorace, par M. le Baron Walckenaer, 2 vols. Paris, 1840. 3. Fasti Horatiani^ scrip- sit C. Franke, 1839. 4. The article Horatius, in Ersch and Gruber's Encyclop'ddie^ by G. F. Grotefend. 5. Quintus Horatius Flaccus als Mensch und Dichter, von Dr. W. E. Weber, Jena, 1844. Besides these writers, others, as Heindorf (in his edition of the Satires), C. Passow, in Vita Horai. (prefixed to a German translation of the Epistles), C. Vanderbourg, Preface and Notes to French translation of the Odes, and Weichert, in Poetar. Latin. Reliq.., have entered into this question.

The discrepancies among these ingenious writers may satisfy every judicious reader that they have attempted an impossibility ; that there are no in- ternal grounds, either historical or aesthetic, which can, without the most fanciful and arbitrary proofs, determine the period in the life of Horace to which belong many of his poems, especially of his Odes.

On the other hand, it is clear that the chronology of Bentley must submit to very important modi- fications.

The general outline of his scheme as to ih^. period