For full justification of these graceful amenities we must turn to the lyrical poems. The Satires and Epistles, as their author frequently reminds us, were in prose: the revealed Horatian secret, the condensed expression of the Horatian charm, demanded musical verse; and this we have in the Odes and Epodes. The word Ode is Greek for a Song; Epode was merely a metrical term to express an ode which alternated in longer and shorter lines, and we may treat them all alike as Odes. The Epodes are amongst his earliest publications, and bear signs of a 'prentice hand. "Iambi," he calls them, a Greek word meaning "lampoons"; and six of them are bitter personal attacks on individuals, foreign to the good breeding and urbanity which distinguish his later writings. More of the same class he is believed to have suppressed, retaining these as specimens of that earlier style, and because, though inchoate, they won the admiration of Virgil, and preferred their author to the patronage of Maecenas. One of the finer Epodes (Epod. ix) has peculiar interest, as written probably on the deck of Maecenas' galley during or immediately after the battle of Actium; and is in that case the sole extant contemporary record of the engagement. It reflects the loathing kindled in Roman breasts by Antony's emasculate subjugation to his paramour; imagines with horror a dissolute Egyptian harlot triumphant and supreme in Rome, with her mosquito-curtained beds and litters, and her train of wrinkled eunuchs. It describes with a spectator's accuracy the desertion of the Gallic contingent during the battle, the leftward flight of Antony's fleet: then, with his favourite device of lapsing from high-wrought passion into comedy, Horace bewails his own sea-sickness when the excitement of the fight is over, and calls for cups of wine to quell it. In another Epode (Epod. ii) he recalls his boyish memories in praise of country life: the vines wedded to poplars in the early spring, after that the sheepshearing, later still the grape-gathering and honey harvest; when winter comes, the hunting of the boar by day, at night the cheery meal with wife and children upon olives, sorrel, mallows, beside the crackling log-piled hearth. Even here he is not weaned from the tricks of mocking irony manifest in his early writings and born perhaps of his early struggles; for he puts this delicious pastoral, which tinkles through the page like Milton's "L'Allegro," into the mouth of a Roman capitalist, who, bitten by transient passion for a country life, calls in all his money that he may buy a farm, pines in country retirement for the Stock Exchange, sells his estate in quick disgust, and returns to city life: So said old Ten-per-cent, when he A jolly farmer fain would be. His moneys he called in amain-- Next week he put them out again. is the spirited rendering of Mr. Goldwin Smith.