And so he wrote to Horace--the letter is quoted by Suetonius--"Look you, I take it much amiss that none of your writings of this class are addressed to me. Are you afraid it will damage your reputation with posterity to be thought to have been one of my intimates?" Such a letter, had Horace been a vain man or an indiscreet, might have misled him into approaching Augustus with the freedom he courted. But he fell into no such error. There is perfect frankness throughout the whole of the Epistle, with which he met the Emperor's request (II. 1), but the social distance between them is maintained with an emphasis which it is impossible not to feel. The Epistle opens by skilfully insinuating that, if the poet has not before addressed the Emperor, it is that he may not be suspected of encroaching on the hours which were due to the higher cares of state:-- "Since you, great Caesar, singly wield the charge Of Rome's concerns, so manifold and large,-- With sword and shield the commonwealth protect, With morals grace it, and with laws correct,-- The bard, methinks, would do a public wrong, Who, having gained your ear, should keep it long." (C.) It is not while they live, he continues, that, in the ordinary case, the worth of the great benefactors of mankind is recognised. Only after they are dead, do misunderstanding and malice give way to admiration and love. Rome, it is true, has been more just. It has appreciated, and it avows, how much it owes to Augustus. But the very same people who have shown themselves wise and just in this are unable to extend the same principle to living literary genius. A poet must have been long dead and buried, or he is nought. The very flaws of old writers are cried up as beauties by pedantic critics, while the highest excellence in a writer of the day meets with no response. "Had Greece but been as carping and as cold To new productions, what would now be old? What standard works would there have been, to come Beneath the public eye, the public thumb?" (C.) Let us then look the facts fairly in the face; let us "clear our minds of cant." If a poem be bad in itself, let us say so, no matter how old or how famous it be; if it be good, let us be no less candid, though the poet be still struggling into notice among us. Thanks, he proceeds, to our happy times, men are now devoting themselves to the arts of peace. "_Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit_"--"Her ruthless conqueror Greece has overcome." The Romans of the better class, who of old thought only of the triumphs of the forum, or of turning over their money profitably, are now bitten by a literary furor. "Pert boys, prim fathers, dine in wreaths of bay, And 'twixt the courses warble out the lay." (C.)