atian personages, remarks Dean Milman, would
contain almost every famous name of the Augustan age.

5. AMATORY. "Speak'st thou of nothing but ladies?" says Feste the Jester
to poor Malvolio. He might have said the same to Horace; for of the Odes
in the first three Books one third part is addressed to or concerned
with women. How many of the pretty female names which musicalize his
love songs, in syllables that breathe of the sweet south and melt like
kisses in the utterance, are representative of real girls, we cannot
guess; with none of them except perhaps one, who died young, does he
seem to have been really in love. He was forty years old when most
of his amorous Odes were written; an age at which, as George Eliot
has reminded us, the baptism of passion is by aspersion rather than
immersion. Something he must have known of love, or he could not write
as he has done; but it is the superficial gallantry of a flirt rather
than the impassioned self-surrender of a lover; of a gay bachelor, with
roving critical eye, heart whole yet fancy free, too practised a judge
of beauty to become its slave. Without emotion, without reverence, but
with keen relishing appreciation, he versifies Pyrrha's golden curls,
and Lycoris' low forehead--feminine beauties both to a Roman eye--and
Phyllis' tapering arms and shapely ankles, and Chia's dimpled cheek,
and the tangles of Neaera's hair, and the gadabout baggage Lyde,
and Glycera's dazzling complexion that blinds the gazer's eye
(I, v, xix, xxxiii; II, iv, 21; III, xiv, 21). They are all inconstant
good-for-noughts, he knows; but so are men, and so is he; keep up the
pleasant give-and-take, the quarrels and the reconciliations. All the
youths of Rome are in love with a beautiful Ninon D'Enclos named
Barine--Matthew Arnold declared this to be the finest of all the Odes
(II, viii)--she perjures herself with every one in turn. But it seems to
answer; she shines forth lovelier than ever. Venus and the nymphs only
laugh, and her lovers, young and old, continue to hug their chains.

New captives fill the nets you weave;
New slaves are bred; and those before,
Though oft they threaten, never leave
Your perjured door.

Sometimes he plays the monitor. Asterie's husband is laid up in Greece
by contrary winds: he is faithful to his wife, though his hostess tempts
him: let the wife be on her guard against her handsome neighbour Enipeus
(III, vii). His own charmers are sometimes obdur