It is needless to say with what hardly matched and certainly unsurpassed shrewdness and neatness Horace has—not merely in the tags, the phrases, the purple patches themselves [Sidenote: _and practical value._] noted above, but throughout—set forth, enforced, decorated his views. Except in a few extremest moods, when the whole world of literature seems to be at once painted red and strangled with the tape that paints it, he is never absurd; he is never even negligible. The most “dishevelled” Romantic may neglect him, but the neglect will always be at his own peril—he must be a Shakespeare, or at least a Marlowe, a Shelley, or at least a Beddoes, if he flies in the face of the Horatian precepts. These precepts even, in the opening, in the “mediocrity” remark, in the peroration and elsewhere, contain not a little antidote for their own bane. “Not worth writing” would be the Horatian verdict on many a “Classical” poem which the judge might acknowledge to be quite unobjectionably written; while on the other hand the evils of extravagance, of disproportion, of tedious and silly crotchet and caprice, at which he drives full from first to last, are real evils, and by no means to be minimised. It is not rash to say—though perhaps one must have read more literatures, and passed through more phases of literary judgment than one, before saying it with conviction—that there is no school or period of literary practice in which the precepts of Horace, when rightly taken, have lost, or are ever likely to lose, critical validity. To say this is to say a very great deal. But it is not inconsistent with—and it makes especially necessary—the further observation that the critical attitude of Horace is a wofully incomplete one. In the first place, he has left us no really “grasping” judgment of a single writer he has mentioned. He had not much room, but nobody could put a paragraph in a line better than he could, when he understood and cared for the matter. Horace on Orpheus and Amphion, on Homer, nay, on Æschylus and Plautus, is _banal_—badly _banal_, one may add. But let us grant that the knack of luminous summarising of the individual was not, and could not be, yet born, was not even with Longinus, was not even fifteen hundred years after Horace. His shortcomings do not cease here. Here as elsewhere, except in a few passages of the graver philosophy of life, there is no “soul” in him. He has no enthusiasm, no passion. It is perhaps improper to bring together Horace and Mr Browning, but I never read the _Epistola ad Pisones_ without thinking of certain lines of the latter:—