ld say, in command of a brigade of six thousand men, fighting for
what he believed to be the liberty of Rome, in the disastrous battle of
Philippi. Brutus being dead, the dream of glory ended, after the
amnesty, in a scribe's office under one of the quaestors, and the
would-be liberator of his country became a humble clerk in the Treasury,
eking out his meagre salary with the sale of a few verses. Many an old
soldier of Garibaldi's early republican dreams has ended in much the
same way in our own times under the monarchy.

But Horace was born to other things. Chaucer was a clerk in the Custom
House, and found time to be the father of English poetry. Horace's daily
work did not hinder him from becoming a poet. His love of Greek,
acquired in Athens and Asia Minor, and the natural bent of his mind made
him the greatest imitator and adapter of foreign verses that ever lived;
and his character, by its eminently Italian combination of prim
respectability and elastic morality, gave him a two-sided view of men
and things that has left us representations of life in three dimensions
instead of the flat, though often violent, pictures which prejudice
loves best to paint.

In his admiration of Greek poetry, Horace was not a discoverer; he was
rather the highest expression of Rome's artistic want. If Scipio of
Africa had never conquered the Carthaginians at Zama, he would be
notable still as one of the first and most sincere lovers of Hellenic
literature, and as one of the earliest imitators of Athenian manners.
The great conqueror is remembered also as the first man in Rome who
shaved every day, more than a hundred and fifty years before Horace's
time. He was laughed at by some, despised by others and disliked by the
majority for his cultivated tastes and his refined manners.

The Romans had most gifts excepting those we call creative. Instead of
creating, therefore, Rome took her art whole, and by force, from the
most artistic nation the world ever produced. Sculptors, architects,
painters and even poets, such as there were, came captive to Rome in
gangs, were sold at auction as slaves, and became the property of the
rich, to work all their lives at their several arts for their master's
pleasure; and the State rifled Greece and Asia, and even the Greek Italy
of the south, and brought back the masterpieces of an age to adorn
Rome's public places. The Roman was the engineer, the maker of roads, of
aqueducts, of fortifications, the