Horace's taste was as catholic in philosophy as in literature. He was of no school, but sought in the teachings of them all such principles as would make life easier, better, and happier: "_Condo et compono, quae mox depromere possum_"-- "I search and search, and where I find I lay The wisdom up against a rainy day." (C.) He is evermore urging his friends to follow his example;--to resort like himself to these "spells,"--the _verba et voces_, by which he brought his own restless desires and disquieting aspirations into subjection, and fortified himself in the bliss of contentment. He saw they were letting the precious hours slip from their grasp,--hours that might have been so happy, but were so weighted with disquiet and weariness; and he loved his friends too well to keep silence on this theme. We, like them, it has been admirably said, [Footnote: Étude Morale et Littéraire sur les Epitres d'Horace; par J. A. Estienne. Paris, 1851. P.212.] are "possessed by the ambitions, the desires, the weariness, the disquietudes, which pursued the friends of Horace. If he does not always succeed with us, any more than with them, in curing us of these, he at all events soothes and tranquillises us in the moments which we spend with him. He augments, on the other hand, the happiness of those who are already happy; and there is not one of us but feels under obligation to him for his gentle and salutary lessons,--_verbaque et voces_,--for his soothing or invigorating balsams, as much as though this gifted physician of soul and body had compounded them specially for ourselves." When he published the First Book of Epistles he seems to have thought the time come for him to write no more lyrics (Epistles, I. 1):-- "So now I bid my idle songs adieu, And turn my thoughts to what is just and true." (C.) Graver habits, and a growing fastidiousness of taste, were likely to give rise to this feeling. But a poet can no more renounce his lyre than a painter his palette; and his fine "Secular Hymn," and many of the Odes of the Fourth Book, which were written after this period, prove that, so far from suffering any decay in poetical power, he had even gained in force of conception, and in that _curiosa felicitas_, that exquisite felicity of expression, which has been justly ascribed to him by Petronius. Several years afterwards, when writing of the mania for scribbling verse which had beset the Romans, as if, like Dogberry's reading and writing, the faculty of writing poetry came by nature, he alludes to his own sins in the same direction with a touch of his old irony (Epistles, II. 1):-- "E'en I, who vow I never write a verse, Am found as false as Parthia, maybe worse; Before the dawn I rouse myself and call For pens and parchment, writing-desk, and all. None dares be pilot who ne'er steered a craft; No untrained nurse administers a draught; None but skilled workmen handle workmen's tools; But verses all men scribble, wise or fools." (C.)