"Pan who keeps watch o'er easy souls like mine. Remember, then, to rear In gratitude to Jove a votive shrine, And slaughter many a steer, Whilst I, as fits, an humbler tribute pay, And a meek lamb upon his altar lay." [1] So Cowley, in his poem on the death of Mr William Harvey:-- "He was my friend, the truest friend on earth; A strong and mighty influence joined our birth." What the poet, in this burst of loving sympathy, said would happen, did happen almost as he foretold it. Maecenas "first deceased;" and Horace, like the wife in the quaint, tender, old epitaph, "For a little tried To live without him, liked it not, and died." But this was not till many years after this Ode was written, which must have been about the year B.C. 36, when Horace was thirty-nine. Maecenas lived for seventeen years afterwards, and often and often, we may believe, turned to read the Ode, and be refreshed by it, when his pulse was low, and his heart sick and weary. Horace included it in the first series of the Odes, containing Books I. and II., which he gave to the world (B.C. 24). The first of these Odes, like the first of the Satires, is addressed to Maecenas. They had for the most part been written, and were, no doubt, separately in circulation several years before. That they should have met with success was certain; for the accomplished men who led society in Rome must have felt their beauty even more keenly than the scholars of a more recent time. These lyrics brought the music of Greece, which was their ideal, into their native verse; and a feeling of national pride must have helped to augment their admiration. Horace had tuned his ear upon the lyres of Sappho and Alcaeus. He had even in his youth essayed to imitate them in their own tongue,--a mistake as great as for Goethe or Heine to have tried to put their lyrical inspiration into the language of Herrick or of Burns. But Horace was preserved from perseverance in this mistake by his natural good sense, or, as he puts it himself, with a fair poetic licence (Satires, I. 10), by Rome's great founder Quirinus warning him in a dream, that "To think of adding to the mighty throng Of the great paragons of Grecian song, Were no less mad an act than his who should Into a forest carry logs of wood." These exercises may not, however, have been without their value in enabling him to transfuse the melodic rhythm of the Greeks into his native verse. And as he was the first to do this successfully, if we except Catullus in some slight but exquisite poems, so he was the last. "Of lyrists," says Quintilian, "Horace is alone, one might say, worthy to be read. For he has bursts of inspiration, and is full of playful delicacy and grace; and in the variety of his images, as well as in expression, shows a most happy daring." Time has confirmed the verdict; and it has recently found eloquent expression in the words of one of our greatest scholars:--