rest and craftsmanship
as well as bulk, perhaps the very best of all. The latest standard
edition of his letters, to which additions are still being made, is in
sixteen well-filled volumes, and there are probably few readers of good
taste and fair knowledge who would object if it could be extended to
sixty. There is perhaps no body of epistles except Madame de Sevigne's
own--which Horace fervently admired and, assisted perhaps by the
feminine element in his own nature, copied assiduously--exhibiting the
possible charm of letter-writing more distinctly or more copiously.

To examine the nature of this charm a little cannot be irrelevant in
such an Introduction as this: and from what has just been said it would
seem that these letters will form as good a specimen for examination as
any. They are not very much "mannerised": indeed, nobody but Thackeray,
in the wonderful chapter of _The Virginians_ where Horace is made to
describe his first interview with one of the heroes, has ever quite
imitated them. Their style, though recognisable at once, is not a matter
so much of phrase as of attitude. His revelations of character--his own
that is to say, for Horace was no conjuror with any one else's--are
constant but not deeply drawn. He cannot, or at least does not, give a
plot of any kind: every letter is a sort of _review_ of the
subject--larger or smaller--from the really masterly accounts of the
trial of the Jacobite Lords after the "Forty-five" to the most trivial
notices of people going to see "Strawberry"; of remarkable hands at
cards; of Patty Blount (Pope's Patty) in her autumn years passing his
windows with her gown tucked up because of the rain. Art and letters
appear; travelling and visiting; friendship and society; curious belated
love-making with the Miss Berrys; scandal (a great deal of it); charity
(a little, but more than the popular conception of Horace allows for);
the court-calendar, club life, almost all manner of things except
religion (though it is said Horace had an early touch of Methodism) and
really serious thought of any kind, form the budget of his letter-bag.
And it is all handled with the most unexpected equality of success.
There is of course nothing very "arresting." Cooking chickens in a sort
of picnic with madcap ladies, and expecting "the dish to fly about our
ears" is perhaps the most exciting incident[17] of the sixteen volumes
and seven or eight thousand pages. But everywhere there is interes