sm of Latin poetry past and present; comparing, like Swift's
"Battle of the Books," the merits of the contemporary and of the older
masters. There is a foolish mania just now, he says, for admiring our
older poets, not because they are good, but because they are old. The
origin and development of Roman poetry made it certain that perfection
must come late. He assumes that Augustus champions the moderns, and
compliments him on the discernment which preferred a Virgil and a Varius
(and so, by implication, a Horace) to the Plautuses and Terences of the
past.

The "Art of Poetry" is thought to be an unfinished work. Unmethodical
and without proportion, it may have been either compiled clumsily
after the poet's death, or put together carelessly by himself amid
the indolence which grows sometimes upon old age. It declares the
essentials of poetry to be unity of conception and ingenuity of diction,
urges that mechanical correctness must be inspired by depth of feeling,
gives technical rules of dramatic action, of the chorus, of metre.
For matter such as this a Horace was not needed, but the felicity of
its handling has made it to many Horatian students the most popular of
his conversational works. It abounds in passages of finished beauty; such
as his comparison of verbal novelties imported into a literature with
the changing forest leaves; his four ages of humanity--the childish,
the adolescent, the manly, the senile--borrowed from Aristotle, expanded
by Shakespeare, and taken up by Keats; his comparison of Poetry to
Painting; his delineation of an honest critic. Brief phrases which
have become classical abound. The "purple patch" sewn on to a sober
narrative; the wine jar turning to a pitcher as the potter's wheel
revolves; the injunction to keep a book ten years before you publish
it; the near kinship of terseness to obscurity; the laughable outcome
of a mountain's labour; the warning to be chary of bringing gods upon
the stage; the occasional nod of Homer;--are commonplace citations so
crisp and so exhaustive in their Latin garb, that even the unlettered
scientist imports them into his treatises, sometimes with curious
effect.

[Illustration: _Alinari photo._] [_Uffizi Gallery, Florence._

AUGUSTUS.]

If for a full appreciation of these minor beauties a knowledge of the
Latin text is necessary, the more abounding charm of both Satires and
Epistles is accessible to the Latinless reader. For the bursts of poetry
are bri