Page:Horace (IA horacetheo00martrich).pdf/40

 ancient and modern is, that material comforts, as in this epode, enter largely into the dream of the ancient, while independence, beauty, and grandeur are the chief elements in the modern picture:—

To the same class of Horace's early poems, though probably a few years later in date, belongs the following eulogium of a country life and its innocent enjoyments (Epode 2), the leading idea of which was embodied by Pope in the familiar lines, wonderful for finish as the production of a boy of eleven, beginning

With characteristic irony Horace puts his fancies into the mouth of Alphius, a miserly money-lender. No one yearns so keenly for the country and its imagined peace as the overworked city man, when his pulse is low and his spirits weary with bad air and the reaction at over-execitement; no one, as a rule, is more apt to tire of the homely and uneventful life which the country offers, or to find that, for him at least, its quietude