ef and rare, issuing from amid what Horace often reminds us are
essentially plain prose essays in conversational form, their hexametral
garb an unpoetical accident. Two versions present themselves to the
unclassical student. The first is Conington's scholarly rendering,
hampered sometimes rather than adorned by its metrical shape; the other
is the more recent construe of Dean Wickham, clear, flowing, readable,
stamping with the translator's high authority many a disputed passage.
Both set temptingly before English readers the Rome of Horace's day,
and promote them to an intimacy with his own mind, character, history.
Preferable to both, no doubt, are the "Imitations" of Pope, which do
not aim at literal transference, but work, as does his yet more famous
Homer, by melting down the original, and pouring the fused mass into
an English mould. Their background is Twit'nam and the Mall instead of
Tibur and the Forum; their Maecenas St. John, their Trebatius Fortescue,
their Numicius Murray. Where Horace appeals to Ennius and Attius,
they cite Shakespeare and Cowley; while the forgotten wits, worthies,
courtiers, spendthrifts of Horatian Rome reappear as Lord Hervey or Lady
Mary, as Shippen, Chartres, Oldfield, Darteneuf; and Horace's delicate
flattery of a Roman Emperor is travestied with diabolical cleverness
into bitter mockery of an English king. In these easy and polished
metamorphoses we have Pope at his very best; like Horace, an epitome
of his time, bearing the same relation, as patriot, scholar, worldling,
epicurean, poet, satirist, to the London of Queen Anne, which Horace
bore to the Augustan capital; and so reproducing in an English garb
something at any rate of the exotic flavour of his original. In an
age when Pope is undeservedly and disastrously neglected, I shall do
well to present some few Horatian samples from the king-poet of his
century; by whose wit and finish, unsurpassed if not unequalled in our
literature, the taste of my own contemporaries was formed; and to whom
a public which decries or ignores him pays homage every day, by quoting
from him unconsciously oftener than from anyone except Shakespeare.

Here is a specimen from the Satires, heightening our interest in
Horace's picture by its adaptation to familiar English characters. Great
Scipio and Laelius, says Horace (Sat. II, i, 72), could unbend their
dignity to trifle and even to romp with Lucilius. Says Pope of his own
Twickenham home:

Know,