[Footnote 1: May the writer ask indulgence while he recalls how, exactly fifty-eight years ago, as senior boy at Winchester, he recited this Satire publicly, receiving in recompense at Warden Barter's hands the Queen's silver medal for elocution.] * * * * * Between the latest of the Satires and the earliest of the Epistles, we have to reckon an interval of something like ten years, during which had been published the Epodes and the majority of the Odes. "Epistles" his editors have agreed to entitle them; but not all of them are genuine Letters. Some are rather dedicated than written to the persons whose names they bear; some are thrown for literary purposes into epistolary form; some again are definitely and personally addressed to friends. "Sermons" he calls them himself as he called the Satires, and their motive is mostly the same; like those, they are Conversations, only with absent correspondents instead of with present interlocutors, real or imagined. He follows in them the old theme, the art of living, the happiness of moderation and contentment; preaching easily as from Rabelais' easy chair, with all the Frenchman's wit, without his grossness. And, as we read, we feel how the ten years of experience, of thought, of study, have matured his views of life, how again the labour spent during their progress on lyrical composition, with perhaps the increasing influence over his taste of Virgil's poetry, have trained his ear, mellowed and refined his style. "The Epistles of Horace," says Dean Milman, "are, with the Poem of Lucretius, the Georgics of Virgil, and perhaps the Satires of Juvenal, the most perfect and most original form of Roman verse."