Page:The works of Horace - Christopher Smart.djvu/296

. On you, while present among us, we confer mature honors, and rear altars where your name is to be sworn by; confessing that nothing equal to you has hitherto risen, or will hereafter rise. But this your people, wise and just in one point (for preferring you to our own, you to the Grecian heroes), by no means estimate other things with like proportion and measure: and disdain and detest every thing, but what they see removed from earth and already gone by; such favorers are they of antiquity, as to assert that the Muses [themselves] upon Mount Alba, dictated the twelve tables, forbidding to transgress, which the decemviri ratified; the leagues of our kings concluded with the Gabii, or the rigid Sabines; the records of the pontifices, and the ancient volumes of the augurs.

If, because the most ancient writings of the Greeks are also the best, The common interpretation of this place supposes the poet to admit the most ancient of the Greek writings to be the best—which were even contrary to all experience and common sense, and is directly confuted by the history of the Greek learning. What he allows is, the superiority of the oldest Greek writings extant, which is a very different thing. The turn of his argument confines us to this sense. For he would show the folly of concluding the same of the old Roman writers, on their first rude attempts to copy the finished models of Greece, as of the old Greek writers themselves, who were furnished with the means of producing those models by long discipline and cultivation. This appears, certainly, from what follows: “Venimus ad summum fortunæ: pingimus atque Psallimus et luctamur Achivis doctiiis unctis. The design of which hath been entirely overlooked; for it hath been taken only for a general expression of falsehood and absurdity, of just the same import as the proverbial line, “Nil intra est oleam, nil extra est in nuce duri.” Whereas it was designedly pitched upon to convey a particular illustration of the very absurdity in question, and to show the maintainera of it, from the nature of things, how senseless their position was. It is to this purpose: “As well may it be pretended that we Romans surpass the Greeks in the arts of painting, music, and the exercises of the palæstra, which yet it is confessed we do not, as that our old writers surpass the modern. The absurdity, in either case, is the same. For, as the Greeks, who had long devoted themselves, with great and continued application, to the practice of these arts (which is the force of the epithet uncti, here given them), must for that reason carry the prize from the Romans, who have taken very little pains about them; so, the modern Romans, who have for a long time been studying the arts of poetry and composition, must needs excel the old Roman writers, who had little or no acquaintance with those arts, and had been trained by no previous discipline to the exercise of them.”. Roman authors are to be weighed in the same scale,