d:

The man, who, stretched in Isis' calm retreat,
To books and study gives seven years complete;
See, strowed with learned dust, his nightcap on,
He walks, an object new beneath the sun.
The boys flock round him, and the people stare;
So stiff, so mute! some statue you would swear,
Stept from its pedestal to take the air.

Finally, Horace extols the poet as distinct from the mere versifier
(Ep. II, i, 210). Pope's rendering ought to dispel the plea of an
unfeelingness sometimes lightly urged against him:

Let me for once presume to instruct the times
To know the Poet from the Man of Rhymes:
'Tis he, who gives my breast a thousand pains,
Can make me feel each passion that he feigns,
Enrage, compose, with more than magic art,
With pity and with terror tear my heart;
And snatch me o'er the earth or through the air,
To Thebes, to Athens, when he will, and where.

If only he had handled more! but of the forty-one Conversations Pope
imitated only seven. And so to assimilate those remaining we must
descend from the heights of poetry to the cool sequestered vale of
literal masquerade. To a lady wintering in Rome who consulted me lately
as to guide-books, I ventured to recommend Hawthorne's "Transformation,"
Marion Crawford's "Ave Roma," and Dean Wickham's translation of the
Satires and Epistles.

ODES AND EPODES

I have tried to interpret in some degree the teaching of the Satires
and Epistles. Yet had the author's genius found expression in these
Conversations only, he would not have become through nineteen centuries
the best beloved of Latin poets: beloved in his own time alike by the
weary Atlas Augustus and the refined sensualist Maecenas; "playing round
the heartstrings" of the stern censor Persius; endowed by Petronius and
Quintilian with the prize of incommunicable felicity; the darling of
Dante, Montaigne, Voltaire, Chesterfield; the "old popular Horace" of
Tennyson; the Horace whose "sad earnestness and vivid exactness" pierced
the soul and brain of aged John Henry Newman. "His poems," says a great
French critic (St. Beuve, "Horace"), "form a manual of good taste, of
poetic feeling, of practical and worldly wisdom. The Christian has his
Bible; the scholar his Homer; Port Royal lived on St. Augustine; an
earlier philosophy on Montaigne; Horace comes within the range of all:
in reading him we break not in any way with modernity, yet retain our
hold upon antiquity. I k