Let me for once presume to instruct the times To know the Poet from the Man of Rhymes: 'Tis he, who gives my breast a thousand pains, Can make me feel each passion that he feigns, Enrage, compose, with more than magic art, With pity and with terror tear my heart; And snatch me o'er the earth or through the air, To Thebes, to Athens, when he will, and where. If only he had handled more! but of the forty-one Conversations Pope imitated only seven. And so to assimilate those remaining we must descend from the heights of poetry to the cool sequestered vale of literal masquerade. To a lady wintering in Rome who consulted me lately as to guide-books, I ventured to recommend Hawthorne's "Transformation," Marion Crawford's "Ave Roma," and Dean Wickham's translation of the Satires and Epistles. ODES AND EPODES I have tried to interpret in some degree the teaching of the Satires and Epistles. Yet had the author's genius found expression in these Conversations only, he would not have become through nineteen centuries the best beloved of Latin poets: beloved in his own time alike by the weary Atlas Augustus and the refined sensualist Maecenas; "playing round the heartstrings" of the stern censor Persius; endowed by Petronius and Quintilian with the prize of incommunicable felicity; the darling of Dante, Montaigne, Voltaire, Chesterfield; the "old popular Horace" of Tennyson; the Horace whose "sad earnestness and vivid exactness" pierced the soul and brain of aged John Henry Newman. "His poems," says a great French critic (St. Beuve, "Horace"), "form a manual of good taste, of poetic feeling, of practical and worldly wisdom. The Christian has his Bible; the scholar his Homer; Port Royal lived on St. Augustine; an earlier philosophy on Montaigne; Horace comes within the range of all: in reading him we break not in any way with modernity, yet retain our hold upon antiquity. I know nothing more delightful as one grows in years, when the mind retains its subtlety, but is conscious of increasing languor, than to test the one and brace the other by companionship with a book familiar and frequently re-read: we walk thereby with a supporting staff, stroll leaning upon a friendly arm. This is what Horace does for us: coming back to him in our old age, we recover our youthful selves, and are relieved to learn while we appreciate afresh his well-remembered lines, that if our minds have become more inert, they are also more feeling, than of yore."