HE.--I now am Thracian Chloë's slave, With hand and voice that charms the air, For whom even death itself I'd brave, So fate the darling girl would spare! SHE.--I dote on Calaïs--and I Am all his passion, all his care, For whom a double death I'd die, So fate the darling boy would spare! HE.--What, if our ancient love return, And bind us with a closer tie, If I the fair-haired Chloë spurn, And as of old, for Lydia sigh? SHE.--Though lovelier than yon star is he, And lighter thou than cork--ah why? More churlish, too, than Adria's sea, With thee I'd live, with thee I'd die!" In this graceful trifle Horace is simply dealing with one of the commonplaces of poetry, most probably only transplanting a Greek flower into the Latin soil. There is more of the vigour of originality and of living truth in the following ode to Bariné (II. 8), where he gives us a cameo portrait, carved with exquisite finish, of that _beauté de diable_, "dallying and dangerous," as Charles Lamb called Peg Woffington's, and, what hers was not, heartless, which never dies out of the world. A real person, Lord Lytton thinks, "was certainly addressed, and in a tone which, to such a person, would have been the most exquisite flattery; and as certainly the person is not so addressed by a lover"--a criticism which, coming from such an observer, outweighs the opposite conclusions of a score of pedantic scholars:-- "If for thy perjuries and broken truth, Bariné, thou hadst ever come to harm, Hadst lost, but in a nail or blackened tooth, One single charm, "I'd trust thee; but when thou art most forsworn, Thou blazest forth with beauty most supreme, And of our young men art, noon, night, and morn, The thought, the dream. "To thee 'tis gain thy mother's dust to mock, To mock the silent watchfires of the night, All heaven, the gods, on whom death's icy shock Can never light. "Smiles Venus' self, I vow, to see thy arts, The guileless Nymphs and cruel Cupid smile, And, smiling, whets on bloody stone his darts Of fire the while. "Nay more, our youth grow up to be thy prey, New slaves throng round, and those who crouched at first, Though oft they threaten, leave not for a day Thy roof accurst. "Thee mothers for their unfledged younglings dread; Thee niggard old men dread, and brides new-made, In misery, lest their lords neglect their bed, By thee delayed."