in
praise of country life: the vines wedded to poplars in the early spring,
after that the sheepshearing, later still the grape-gathering and honey
harvest; when winter comes, the hunting of the boar by day, at night the
cheery meal with wife and children upon olives, sorrel, mallows, beside
the crackling log-piled hearth. Even here he is not weaned from the
tricks of mocking irony manifest in his early writings and born perhaps
of his early struggles; for he puts this delicious pastoral, which
tinkles through the page like Milton's "L'Allegro," into the mouth of a
Roman capitalist, who, bitten by transient passion for a country life,
calls in all his money that he may buy a farm, pines in country
retirement for the Stock Exchange, sells his estate in quick disgust,
and returns to city life:

So said old Ten-per-cent, when he
A jolly farmer fain would be.
His moneys he called in amain--
Next week he put them out again.

is the spirited rendering of Mr. Goldwin Smith.

In his remaining Epodes we may trace the germ of his later written
Odes. We have the affectionate addresses to Maecenas, the disgust at
civil discords, the cheery invitations to the wine cup, the wooing
of some coy damsel. By and by Maecenas presses him to bring them out
completed in a volume, and he pleads a fugitive amour in excuse for his
delay. Published, however, they were, notwithstanding the distractions
of Neaera; went, neatly written out in red-lined columns, to the
brothers Sosii in the street called Argiletum, to be multiplied by the
librarian's scribes on well-bleached Egyptian papyrus, bound in pumiced
parchment, stored in metal boxes on the bookseller's shelves within,
while the names of the author and his work were inscribed upon a pillar
outside the shop, as a guide to intending purchasers. Copies were sold,
probably, for a few denarii each; what would we not give for one of them
to-day? Let us hope that their author was well paid.

Horace was now thirty-five years old: the Epodes had taught him his
power over lyric verse. He had imitated at first the older Roman
satirists; here by Maecenas' advice he copied from Greek models, from
Alcaeus and Sappho, claiming ever afterwards with pride that he was
the first amongst Roman poets to wed Aeolian lays to notes of Italy
(Od. III, xxx, 13). He spent seven years in composing the first three
Books of the Odes, which appeared in a single volume about B.C. 23.
More than any of his po