In this picture of Necessity drawn by Horace, perhaps the richest in attributes of any to be found in the old poets, the nails, the clamps, and the liquid lead, whether regarded as means of confinement or implements of punishment, still belong to the class of poetical, rather than allegorical, attributes. But, even so, they are too crowded; and the passage is one of the least effective in Horace. Sanadon says: “J’ose dire que ce tableau, pris dans le détail, serait plus beau sur la toile que dans une ode héroïque. Je ne puis souffrir cet attirail patibulaire de clous, de coins, de crocs, et de plomb fondu. J’ai cru en devoir décharger la traduction, en substituant les idées générales aux idées singulières. C’est dommage que le poëte ait eu besoin de ce correctif.” Sanadon’s sentiment was fine and true, but he does not give the right ground for it. The objection is not that these attributes are the paraphernalia of the gallows, for he had but to interpret them in their other sense to make them the firmest supports of architecture. Their fault is in being addressed to the eye and not to the ear. For all impressions meant for the eye, but presented to us through the ear, are received with effort, and produce no great degree of vividness. These lines of Horace remind me of a couple of oversights on the part of Spence, which give us no very good idea of the exactitude with which he has studied the passages he cites from the old poets. He is speaking of the image under which the Romans represented faith or honesty. (Dial. x.) “The Romans,” he says, “called her ‘Fides;’ and, when they called her ‘Sola Fides,’ seem to mean the same as we do by the words ‘downright honesty.’ She is represented with an erect, open air, and with nothing but a thin robe on, so fine that one might see through it. Horace therefore calls her ‘thin-dressed’ in one of his odes, and ‘transparent’ in another.” In these few lines are not less than three gross errors. First, it is false that “sola” was a distinct epithet applied to the goddess Fides. In the two passages from Livy, which he adduces as proof (lib. i. sect. 21, lib. ii. sect. 3), the word has only its usual signification,—the exclusion of all else. In one place, indeed, the “soli” has been questioned by the critics, who think it must have crept into the text through an error in writing, occasioned by the word next to it, which is “solenne.” In the other passage cited, the author is not speaking of fidelity at all, but of innocence, Innocentia. Secondly, Horace, in one of his odes (the thirty-fifth of the first book, mentioned above), is said to have applied to Fides the epithet thin-dressed: Te spes, et albo rara fides colit Velata panno.