But this craze is no unmixed evil; for, take him all in all, your poet can scarcely be a bad fellow. Pulse and second bread are a banquet for him. He is sure not to be greedy or close-fisted; for to him, as Tennyson in the same spirit says, "Mellow metres are more than ten per cent." Neither is he likely to cheat his partner or his ward. He may cut a poor figure in a campaign, but he does the state good service at home. "His lessons form the child's young lips, and wean The boyish ear from words and tales unclean; As years roll on, he moulds the ripening mind, And makes it just and generous, sweet and kind; He tells of worthy precedents, displays The examples of the past to after days, Consoles affliction, and disease allays." (C.) Horace then goes on to sketch the rise of poetry and the drama among the Romans, glancing, as he goes, at the perverted taste which was making the stage the vehicle of mere spectacle, and intimating his own high estimate of the dramatic writer in words which Shakespeare seems to have been meant to realise:-- "That man I hold true master of his art, Who with fictitious woes can wring my heart; Can rouse me, soothe me, pierce me with the thrill Of vain alarm, and, as by magic skill, Bear me to Thebes, to Athens, where you will." (C.) Here, as elsewhere, Horace treats dramatic writing as the very highest exercise of poetic genius; and, in dwelling on it as he does, he probably felt sure of carrying with him the fullest sympathies of Augustus. For among his varied literary essays, the Emperor, like most dilettanti, had tried his hand upon a tragedy. Failing, however, to satisfy himself, he had the rarer wisdom to suppress it. The story of his play was that of Ajax, and when asked one day how it was getting on, he replied that his hero "had finished his career upon a sponge!"--"_Ajacem suum in spongio incubuisse_."