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in the mind of man, as to leave us nothing but the every-day world in its cold and barren reality.

Poetry, indeed, which thrills and melts; which stirs the very depths of the heart and soul; which creates, or stretches its reanimating wand over the past, the distant, the unseen, may be, and no doubt is, a very different production of the wonderful mechanism of the human mind from that which has only the impressive language and the harmonious expression, without the fiction of poetry; but human life, even in its calmest form, will still delight in seeing itself reflected in the pure mirror of poetry; and poetry has too much real dignity, too much genuine sympathy with universal human nature, to condescend to be exclusive. There is room enough on the broad heights of Helicon, at least on its many peaks, for Homer and Menander, for Virgil and Horace, for Shakespeare, and Pope, and Cowper. May we not pass, without supposing that we are abandoning the sacred precincts of the Muses, from the death of Dido to the Epistle to Augustus? Without asserting that anything like a regular cycle brings round the taste for a particular style of composition, or that the demand of the human mind (more poetic readers must not be shocked by this adoption of the language of political economy) requires, and is still further stimulated by the supply of a particular kind of production at particular periods; it may be said, in general, that poetry begets prose, and prose poetrythat is to say, when poetry has long occupied itself solely with more imaginative subjects, when it has

been exclusively fictitious and altogether remote from the ordinary affairs of life, there arises a desire for greater truth-for a more close copy of that which actually exists around us. Good sense, keen observation, terse expression, polished harmony, then command and delight, and possess, perhaps in their turn too exclusively, for some time, the public ear. But directly this familiarity with common life has too closely approximated poetry to prose-when it is undistinguished, or merely distinguished from prose by a conventional poetic language, or certain regular forms of verse-then the poetic spirit bursts away again into freedom; and, in general, in its first struggle for emancipation, breaks out into extravagance; the unfettered imagination runs riot, and altogether scorns the alliance of truth and nature to which it falsely attributes its long and ignoble thraldom; till some happy spirit weds again those which should never have been dissevered, and poetry becomes once more, in the language of one of its most enchanting votaries

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Truth severe in faery fiction drest."

Hence may, perhaps, be formed a just estimate of the poetical character of Horace. Of him it may be said, with regard to the most perfect form of his poetry, the Epistles, that there is a period in the literary taste of every accomplished individual, as well as of every country, not certainly in ardent youth, yet far from the decrepitude of old age, in which we become sensible of the extraordinary and undefinable charm of these won

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derful compositions. It seems to require a certain maturity of mind; but that maturity by no means precludes the utmost enjoyment of the more imaginative poetry. It is, in fact, the knowledge of the world which alone completely qualifies us for judging the writings of a man of the world; our own practical wisdom enables us to appreciate that wisdom in its most delightful form.

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POSITION OF HORACE DURING THE DECLINE OF LIFE FRIENDSHIP WITH AUGUSTUS-RELIGION OF HORACEPHILOSOPHY CLOSE OF HIS LIFE-POETICAL CRITICISM-EPISTLES TO AUGUSTUS AND ART OF POETRYDEATH-HIS PERSON.

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EVER was position more favourable than that of Horace for the developement of this poetic character. The later years of his life were passed in an enviable state of literary

leisure He has gradually risen

from the favourite of the emperor's friend, to the poet in whose compositions the shrewd and sagacious

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emperor is said himself to have desired to be enshrined for the admiration of posterity. The first advances to intimacy with the poet came from the emperor himself. Augustus had at first been his own secretary; he had written his own letters to his friends; he offered that honourable and confidential post to the poet. He requested Mæcenas to transfer our Horace, as he condescended to call him, into his service. When the poet declines the offer, Augustus is not in the least offended, and does not grow cool in his friendship. He almost tempts him to ask favours, he assures him of his undiminished regard; "If you," he says, “are so proud as to disdain my friendship, I shall not become haughty in my turn." He writes of him in terms of familiar, and it may almost be said, coarse admiration.(59) The fourth book of Odes and the Secular Hymn were written at the express desire of the emperor, who was ambitions that the extraordinary virtues of his step-sons, Tiberius and Drusus, should be commemorated in the immortal strains of the poet.

There is no reason to reproach Horace either with insincerity or with servility in his praises of the emperor. It is remarkable how much his respect for Augustus seems to strengthen, and his affection to kindle into personal attachment, as we approach the

(59) "Ante ipse sufficiebam scribendis Epistolis Amicorum; nunc occupatissimus et infirmus, Horatium nostrum te cupio addicere. Veniat igitur ab istâ parasiticâ mensâ ad hanc regiam, et nos in Epistolis scribendis adjuvet."-See the fragments of the other letters of Augustus, in Suetonii Vit. Horat. -“neque enim si tu superbus amicitiam nostram sprevisti, ideo nos quoque ἀντυπερηφανοῦμεν.”

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