From the drama Horace proceeds to speak of the more timid race of bards, who, "instead of being hissed and acted, would be read," and who, himself included, are apt to do themselves harm in various ways through over-sensitiveness or simplicity. Thus, for example, they will intrude their works on Augustus, when he is busy or tired; or wince, poor sensitive rogues, if a friend ventures to take exception to a verse; or bore him by repeating, unasked, one or other of their pet passages, or by complaints that their happiest thoughts and most highly-polished turns escape unnoticed; or, worse folly than all, they will expect to be sent for by Augustus the moment he comes across their poems, and told "to starve no longer, and go writing on." Yet, continues Horace, it is better the whole tribe should be disappointed, than that a great man's glory should be dimmed, like Alexander's, by being sung of by a second-rate poet. And wherefore should it be so, when Augustus has at command the genius of such men as Virgil and Varius? They, and they only, are the fit laureates of the Emperor's great achievements; and in this way the poet returns, like a skilful composer, to the _motif_ with which he set out--distrust of his own powers, which has restrained, and must continue to restrain, him from pressing himself and his small poetic powers upon the Emperor's notice. In the other poems which belong to this period--the Second Epistle of the Second Book, and the Epistle to the Pisos, generally known as the _Ars Poetica_--Horace confines himself almost exclusively to purely literary topics. The dignity of literature was never better vindicated than in these Epistles. In Horace's estimation it was a thing always to be approached with reverence. Mediocrity in it was intolerable. Genius is much, but genius without art will not win immortality; "for a good poet's made, as well as born." There must be a working up to the highest models, a resolute intolerance of anything slight or slovenly, a fixed purpose to put what the writer has to express into forms at once the most beautiful, suggestive, and compact. The mere trick of literary composition Horace holds exceedingly cheap. Brilliant nonsense finds no allowance from him. Truth--truth in feeling and in thought--must be present, if the work is to have any value. "_Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons_,"-- "Of writing well, be sure the secret lies In wisdom, therefore study to be wise." (C.) Whatever the form of composition, heroic, didactic, lyric, or dramatic, it must be pervaded by unity of feeling and design; and no style is good, or illustration endurable, which, either overlays or does not harmonise with the subject in hand.