of Hygieia_; and
Carducci, whose use of Horatian meters, somewhat strained, is due to the
conscious desire of making Italy's past greatness serve the present. The
names of Bernardo Tasso and Torquato Tasso might be added.

It is not impossible, also, that the musical debt of the world to Italy
is in a measure owing to Horace. Whether the music which accompanied the
_Odes_ as they emerged from the Middle Age was only the invention of
monks, or the survival of actual Horatian music from antiquity, is a
question hardly to be answered; but the setting of Horace to music in
the Renaissance was not without an influence. In 1507, Tritonius
composed four-voice parts for twenty-two different meters of Horace and
other poets. In 1526, Michael engaged in the same effort, and in 1534
Senfl developed the youthful compositions of Tritonius. All this was for
school purposes. With the beginnings of Italian opera, these
compositions, in which the music was without measure and held strictly
to the service of poetry, came to an end. It is not unreasonable to
suspect that in these early attempts at the union of ancient verse and
music there exist the beginnings of the musical drama.

_ii_. IN FRANCE

France, where the great majority of Horatian manuscripts were preserved,
was the first to produce a translation of the _Odes_. Grandichan in
1541, and Pelletier in 1545, published translations of the _Ars Poetica_
which had important consequences. The famous Pleiad, whose most
brilliant star, Pierre de Ronsard, was king of poetry for more than a
score of years, were enthusiastic believers in the imitation of the
classics as a means for the improvement of letters in France. Du Bellay,
the second in magnitude, published in 1550 his _Deffence et illustration
de la langue francoyse_, a manifesto of the Pleiad full of quotations
from the _Ars Poetica_ refuting a similar work of Sibilet published in
1548. Ronsard himself is said to have been the first to use the word
"ode" for Horace's lyrics. The meeting of the two, in 1547, is regarded
as the beginning of the French school of Renaissance poetry. Horace thus
became at the beginning an influence of the first magnitude in the
actual life of modern French letters. In 1579 appeared Mondot's complete
translation. The versions of Dacier and Sanadon, in prose, in the
earlier eighteenth century, were an innovation provoking spirited
opposition in Italy. The line of translators, imitators, and enthusias