INTRODUCTION

FIFTY years ago an apt quotation from the Odes was in English society almost a hall-mark of respectability, and after dinner, if the host produced a magnum of port coæval with himself, the omission of some reference to 'the consul Manlius' would have seemed positively indecorous. Now, however, even in Parliament, where the tradition of classical quotation had been handed down through a long succession of orators, a classical quotation is rarely heard, and since Mr. Gladstone retired perhaps Sir William Harcourt is the only speaker who, with innate conservatism, sometimes forgets that he is addressing a democratic house and amazes his hearers with a fragment of Virgil. As for Horace, since Lord Randolph Churchill pointed a jocular allusion to the magnificence of Mr. W. H. Smith's house in Grosvenor Place with the lines

Non ebur neque aureum

Mea renidet in domo lacunar

it is said that he has not been heard at St. Stephen's, and the younger generation of speakers seem studiously to avoid a practice which might remind their audience that they had been flogged at Eton or passed 'smalls' at Oxford.

Yet, although respect for popular ignorance has thus banished him from political oratory, perhaps no classical poet is more in touch with life and affairs than Horace. He has nothing of the recluse about him; he saw all that was best in Roman society; he knew all the chief men of his day; his great friend and patron was the first minister of the state; he was on terms of close intimacy with the emperor, the poet-laureate of his triumphs abroad and the authorised defender of his policy at home. The panorama of Roman life passes daily under his eyes and is reflected in his writings. In its social, literary, and political aspects he notes it all. From the purity of Barine's finger-nails to Augustus establishing a world-wide empire nothing escapes him. He has a word to say about everything and everybody. His wise maxims and philosophic reflections are invariably pointed and driven home by being referred to the conduct of living men and women— to Asterie, whose conduct as 'a grass-widow' is not above suspicion, or Neobule, who chafes against old prejudices which still hamper the new woman;' to the

philosophic Iccius, who leaves his books to join a goldraid into Arabia, or the aged millionaire who 'forgetful of the tomb' is rearing a palace on the shore of Baiæ.

It is this wealth of personal and local allusions which has helped to make the literal translation of the Odes an impossibility. The proper names which occur so frequently in them have ceased, after twenty centuries, to produce any sense of vividness and reality, and serve rather as a perpetual reminder that we are dealing with a bygone world. For example, in eight lines of Mr. Gladstone's translation there occur the words 'Bosporus,' 'Icarian,' 'Syrtes,' 'Boreas,' 'Dacia,' 'Rome,' 'Colchian,' 'Gelonian,' 'Spain,' and 'Rhone,' and obviously it is beyond the power of any poetic skill to weave such materials into two lyric stanzas which shall present any attraction to an English reader. The consequence is that of those Odes which are, perhaps, especially Horatian because especially allusive, there is not a single rendering which is easy, natural, and attractive, while even in Odes of a more general character the occasional references to a forgotten past still jar upon the ear; and any one who turns to Dryden's brilliant paraphrase of iii. 29 and looks at such a stanza as

Thou what befits the new Lord Mayor,
And what the city factions dare,

And what the Gallic arms will do,

And what the quiver-bearing foe,
Art anxiously inquisitive to know,

will see how strongly his poetic judgment presses him to evade them. No argument, however, will have any effect upon translators of Horace, nor does the failure of a long series of scholars, statesmen, and poets since the days of the Earl of Surrey and Sir Philip Sidney in any way deter them. Felices errore suo they dream of immortality, and within the last four years Wales, Ireland, and the United States have each sent forth a volume which bears equal testimony to the fascination of Horace's verse and to the peculiar difficulty of reproducing it.

None the less, although their perpetual references to men whose memory is cherished by few but schoolmasters must mar the effect of any exact rendering of the Odes, still the Odes themselves are in form and finish so unique, the sense is so lovingly wedded to the words, and the words to the rhythm, that they irresistibly adhere to the memory and attract imitation. They are the models which, should some lyric theme be suggested, naturally present themselves to the mind, and, as Horace does not hesitate himself to borrow the shape and substance of many Odes from the Greek lyrists, so he has in turn afforded material to a host of imitators who from the

time of Andrew Marvell have produced Horatian Odes, more or less resembling the original, in which they have. endeavoured to illustrate with 'modern instances' those 'wise saws' which delighted antiquity. Of course in the case of some Odes, such as the great Roman-Odes in Book iii., which deal with large political questions, such an adaptation of them is undesirable, for where a poem deals seriously with matters of historic interest it does not admit of resetting. But when an Ode is addressed to some individual whose personal affairs give point to its reflections, then surely, when centuries afterwards some other individual is in like circumstances, there can be no objection to transferring its application from the unknown ancient to the familiar modern. Nay, rather the old poem does not lose but gain by being thus brought before us in a newer and more living shape, as any one will see at once if he will read what Macaulay calls the 'pleasing imitation' of Otium Divos rogat which was penned by Warren Hastings on his voyage from Bengal in 1785. The verses of Hastings are not on a par with the verses of Horace, and yet, somehow, after reading them the Latin seems to stand out with a clearer meaning, the old phrases live with a new life.

But it may, perhaps, be urged that while a modernised imitation of the Odes, such as that of Hastings, is