"First from the roll I strike myself of those I poets call, For merely to compose in verse is not the all-in-all; Nor if a man shall write, like me, things nigh to prose akin, Shall he, however well he write, the name of poet win? To genius, to the man-whose soul is touched with fire divine, Whose voice speaks like a trumpet-note, that honoured name assign. 'Tis not enough that you compose your verse In diction irreproachable, pure, scholarly, and terse, Which, dislocate its cadence, by anybody may Be spoken like the language of the father in the play. Divest those things which now I write, and Lucilius wrote of yore, Of certain measured cadences, by setting that before Which was behind, and that before which I had placed behind, Yet by no alchemy will you in the residuum find The members still apparent of the dislocated bard,"-- a result which he contends would not ensue, however much you might disarrange the language of a passage of true poetry, such as one he quotes from Ennius, the poetic charm of which, by the way, is not very apparent. Schooled, however, as he had been, in the pure literature of Greece, Horace aimed at a conciseness and purity of style which had been hitherto unknown in Roman satire, and studied, not unsuccessfully, to give to his own work, by great and well-disguised elaboration of finish, the concentrated force and picturesque precision which are large elements in all genuine poetry. His own practice, as we see from its results, is given in the following lines, and a better description of how didactic or satiric poetry should be written could scarcely be desired (Satires, I. 10). "'Tis not enough, a poet's fame to make, That you with bursts of mirth your audience shake; And yet to this, as all experience shows, No small amount of skill and talent goes. Your style must he concise, that what you say May flow on clear and smooth, nor lose its way, Stumbling and halting through a chaos drear Of cumbrous words, that load the weary ear; And you must pass from grave to gay,--now, like The rhetorician, vehemently strike, Now, like the poet, deal a lighter hit With easy playfulness and polished wit,-- Veil the stern vigour of a soul robust, And flash your fancies, while like death you thrust; For men are more impervious, as a rule, To slashing censure than to ridicule. Here lay the merit of those writers, who In the Old Comedy our fathers drew; Here should we struggle in their steps to tread Whom fop Hermogenes has never read, Nor that mere ape of his, who all day long Makes Calvus and Catullus all his song."