THE POET HORACE.

How strange that so many American parents should name their boys Horace! I suppose that in New England there are a hundred Horaces to one Virgil; while there are a hundred people who enjoy the poetry of Virgil to one that keenly relishes that of Horace. Leaving this mystery to be cleared up by philosophers, I will endeavor to relate in a few words the interesting story of the poet's life; our knowledge of which is chiefly derived from the innumerable allusions to himself and to his affairs in his own works.

His father was a Roman slave, who, some years before Horace was born, obtained his freedom. "Everybody has a fling at me," he says in one of his satires (the sixth of book first), "because I am a freedman's son." He owed his name to the fact that his father's master belonged to the Horatian tribe; though it was long supposed that he was named Horatius because his master was a member of the celebrated family of the Horatii, three of whom had a great fight one day with the Curatii, — as school-boys remember.

Having become a free man, the father of the poet established himself as an auctioneer, which was then, as it is now, a profitable business, especially in times of general distress. The elder Horace by the exercise of his vocation acquired a considerable fortune, with which he bought a mountain farm in the south of Italy, in the midst of the rugged and romantic Apennines. Here, sixty-five years before Christ, Horace was born; and, amid the grandeur and loveliness of this mountain region, he grew up, and nourished that love of natural beauty which appears in so many of his poems. It was here, he tells us, that when he was a young child he wandered far from his father's

house, and, being tired at length, lay down under a thicket of laurel and myrtle, where he was found by anxious friends fast asleep, with his little hands full of the wild flowers he had gathered on the way.

His father, he assures us, was a man of noble disposition and fine understanding; but of his mother he never speaks; from which we may infer that she died before he was old enough to know her. He pays a tribute to his father's virtues in a passage that has been read millions of times with pleasure.

"If," he says, "my faults are few and not heinous (like moles upon a beautiful skin, perfect but for them); if no man can justly accuse me of avarice, meanness, or of frequenting low haunts; if, indeed (to speak in my own praise), I am chaste, innocent, and dear to my friends, I owe it all to my father; who, though far from rich, living on an unfertile farm, would not send me to school under the pedantic Havius, where boys of rank, sprung from great centurions, with their satchels and tablets slung over their left arms, used to go with their school money in their hands on the very day the term was up; but had the energy to bring me, a child to Rome, to be taught the accomplishments which Roman knights and senators teach their children. And yet, if any one had looked at my clothes, and at the slaves who waited upon me in a city so populous, he would certainly have thought that the cost of all this was supplied from the revenues of an hereditary estate. My father himself, of all guardians the most faithful, was continually looking on when my teachers were with me. But why multiply words? He it was who kept me chaste (the first of the virtues); preserving me not only from actual transgression, but even from the appearance of it; nor did he fear lest, by and by, some one should make it a reproach to him that a son, educated at so much cost, should turn out only an auctioneer. And if I had been only that, I should never have complained. The narrowness of his fortune renders his conduct the more admirable, and calls for more gratitude on my part. As long as I am a sane man, never can I be ashamed of a father such as mine was."

This is a rough translation for poetry; but the charm of the passage lies in its meaning. Horace was twelve years of age

when this generous father, unwilling to subject his boy to the taunts of the young aristocrats of his own neighborhood, took him to Rome, where he could pursue his studies and live on terms of equality with his fellows. His father, however, always discouraged any inclination the boy may have had to aspire to a higher rank than his own. He appears to have supposed that he could give his son the education of a man of rank, and then make him content to spend his life as an auctioneer. Many fathers have indulged a dream like this; but I never heard of one who realized it.

At seventeen, Horace, after having enjoyed a rigorous drill in the rudiments of knowledge under severe teachers at Rome. repaired to Athens (which was only a few days' sail from his father's house) to continue his studies. There he began to write verses in the Greek language; but soon discovering the impossibility of equalling the Greek poets in their own language, wrote thenceforth only in Latin.

Great events. transpired in Italy while Horace was growing to manhood. Cæsar crossed the Rubicon, overthrew Pompey, reigned, and was killed by Brutus, while Horace was a student. After the death of Cæsar, Brutus went to Athens, where the young poet was then residing, along with a great number of Roman youth completing their education. Among the young men who joined the forces of Brutus at this time, with the design of restoring the republican constitution, was Horace, to whom Brutus assigned a rank about equal to that of a colonel in a modern army. Under Brutus he served with gallantry and general approval, until the disastrous battle of Philippi, when the republican cause was irretrievably ruined. Horace was borne away, he says, by the torrent of fugitives, and lost his shield in the flight. Brutus and Cassius having committed suicide, he gave up the struggle and made the best of his way home.

Arriving among his native mountains, worn with the toils of war, and saddened by defeat, he found his father dead, his inheritance confiscated, and his head in danger. His life, however, was spared; and he went soon after to Rome, a poor young man of letters, in search of the means of subsistence. He tells us himself what vocation he entered into:

"My wings being clipped, and deprived of house and land, audacious poverty drove me to the making of verses."

He earned his living at this occupation for some time, and even acquired property by it, -sufficient to buy an under-clerkship in the Roman treasury, an office of small salary but smaller duties.

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While he was plodding on, writing verses for hire, young Virgil came to Rome, with the laurel of the successful poet on his brow; welcomed and féted by high and low; a guest even in the imperial palace, and in the house of Mecenas, the favorite and minister of the Emperor Augustus. Virgil, discovering the great genius of Horace, mentioned him to Mecenas, who sent for the unknown poet. Long after, he reminded Mecænas, in one of his satires, of their first interview:

"When first I came into your presence, I spoke but a few words with a stammering tongue, for I was as bashful as a child."

Mecenas, he adds, took no further notice of him for nine months; but at the expiration of that time he sent for him, and "ordered him to be enrolled among the number of his friends." By Mecenas he was presented to the emperor, and both remained his cordial friends as long as he lived. Mecenas gave him a villa a few miles from Rome, and Augustus bestowed upon him a tract of land, which yielded him an income sufficient for his wants, with which he was perfectly contented.

He divided his time henceforth between the country and the When cloyed with the pleasures of the imperial city, he had but to mount his mule and ride fifteen minutes, to reach his farm. His land, well covered with forest, and lying on both sides of a sparkling river, was tilled by five free families and eight slaves, and produced grain, wine, and olives. It abounded in pleasant, secluded scenes, fit for a poet's leisure; and there, too, he delighted to receive his friends from Rome; Mecenas himself being glad to repose there from the toils of government. To this day, Horace's farm is continually visited by travellers residing in Rome, especially by English and Americans. So many of the visitors, indeed, speak the English language, that the peasantry of the neighborhood suppose Horace to have been

some illustrious Englishman, and that the visitors come there to pay homage to the tomb of their countryman. Knowing that Horace was not one of the saints, they cannot conceive of any other cause for such a concourse of visitors to so remote a spot.

Secure in his fortune, Horace enjoyed life in a moderate and rational manner, bestowing upon his poems an amount of labor which would surprise some of our easy verse-makers. He was a poet for thirty-five years, yet the whole of his works could be printed in one number of a newspaper, and leave room besides for this sketch of his life. No man has better followed the ad vice which he himself lays down for authors:

"You that intend to write what deserves to be read more than once, correct and erase much."

His poems, light and chatty as they seem, are the quintessence of all that he thought, felt, observed, and experienced during the whole of the fifty-seven years that he lived; and, besides being that, they throw a flood of light upon the life of the Roman people. He knew well that his works would endure for ages. In a little poem on his works he says, with the noble confidence of patient genius:

"I have constructed a monument more lasting than brass, and grander than the pyramids' royal height; which not the wasting rain, nor the powerful north wind, nor an endless succession of years, nor the round of the seasons, shall be able to destroy. I shall not wholly die; but a large part of me shall not be entombed at my funeral. Posterity will renew my praises from age to age, as long as the priest shall ascend the steps of the capitol with the vestal virgin silent at his side."

Yes; and longer! The Roman priest ascends no more the capitol steps; the capitol itself has disappeared; the language of Rome has become, in Rome itself, an unknown tongue; and still the well-wrought poems of Horace are enjoyed wherever on earth there are educated minds more than forty years of age. Virgil is the poet for youth; Horace is the treasure of men.

The learned and public-spirited Judge Daly, of the New York Court of Common Pleas, who has in his possession the papers and correspondence of Chancellor Kent, says that the chancellor knew Horace almost by heart, having read all his poems eight