5. LYRIC POETRY.--The Romans had not the ideality and the enthusiasm which are the elements of lyric poetry, and in all the range of their literature there are only two poets who, greatly inferior to the lyric poets of Greece, have a positive claim to a place in this department, Catullus and Horace. Catullus (86-46 B.C.) was born near Verona. At an early age he went to Rome, where he plunged into all the excesses of the capital, and where his sole occupation was the cultivation of his literary tastes and talents. A career of extravagance and debauchery terminated in the ruin of his fortune, and he died at the age of forty. The works of Catullus consist of numerous short pieces of a lyrical character, elegies and other poems. He was one of the most popular of the Roman poets, because he possessed those qualities which the literary society at Rome most valued, polish and learning, and because, although an imitator, there was a truly Roman nationality in all that he wrote. His satire was the bitter resentment of a vindictive spirit; his love and his hate were both purely selfish, but his excellences were of the most alluring and captivating kind. He has never been surpassed in gracefulness, melody, and tenderness. Horace (65-8 B.C.), like Virgil and other poets of his time, enjoyed the friendship and intimacy of Maecenas, who procured for him the public grant of his Sabine farm, situated about fifteen miles from Tivoli. At Rome he occupied a house on the beautiful heights of the Esquiline. The rapid alternation of town and country life, which the fickle poet indulged in, gives a peculiar charm to his poetry. His "Satires" were followed by the publication of the "Odes" and the "Epistles." The satires of Horace occupied the position of the fashionable novel of our day. In them is sketched boldly, but good-humoredly, a picture of Roman social life, with its vices and follies. They have nothing of the bitterness of Lucilius, the love of purity and honor that adorns Persius, or the burning indignation of Juvenal at the loathsome corruption of morals. Vice, in his day, had not reached that appalling height which it attained in the time of the emperors who succeeded Augustus. Deficient in moral purity, nothing would strike him as deserving censure, except such excess as would actually defeat the object which he proposed to himself, namely, the utmost enjoyment of life. In the "Epistles," he lays aside the character of a moral teacher or censor, and writes with the freedom with which he would converse with an intimate friend. But it is in his inimitable "Odes" that the genius of Horace as a poet is especially displayed; they have never been equaled in beauty of sentiment, gracefulness of language, and melody of versification; they comprehend every variety of subject suitable to the lyric muse; they rise without effort to the most elevated topics; and they descend to the simplest joys and sorrows of every-day life.