Meanwhile he was content to be known as a writer of satire, one whose wish it was to bring up to an Augustan polish the literary form already carried to a high degree of success by Lucilius. The second book of _Satires_ was published not long after the _Epodes_. It shows in every way an enormous advance over the first. He has shaken himself free from the imitation of Lucilius, which alternates in the earliest satires with a rather bitter and self-conscious depreciation of the work of the older poet and his successors. The prosperous turn Horace's own life had taken was ripening him fast, and undoing the bad effects of earlier years. We have passed for good out of the society of Rupilius Rex and Canidia. At one time Horace must have run the risk of turning out a sort of ineffectual François Villon; this, too, is over, and his earlier education bears fruit in a temper of remarkable and delicate gifts. This second book of _Satires_ marks in one way the culmination of Horace's powers. The brilliance of the first years of the Empire stimulated the social aptitude and dramatic perception of a poet who lived in the heart of Rome, already free from fear or ambition, but as yet untouched by the melancholy temper which grew on him in later years. He employs the semi-dramatic form of easy dialogue throughout the book with extraordinary lightness and skill. The familiar hexameter, which Lucilius had left still cumbrous and verbose, is like wax in his hands; his perfection in this use of the metre is as complete as that of Virgil in the stately and serious manner. And behind this accomplished literary method lies an unequalled perception of common human nature, a rich vein of serious and quiet humour, and a power of language the more remarkable that it is so unassuming, and always seems as it were to say the right thing by accident. With the free growth of his natural humour he has attained a power of self-appreciation which is unerring. The _Satires_ are full from end to end of himself and his own affairs; but the name of egoism cannot be applied to any self-revelation or self-criticism which is so just and so certain. From the opening lines of the first satire, where he notes the faults of his own earlier work, to the last line of the book, with its Parthian shot at Canidia and the _jeunesse orageuse_ that he had so long left behind, there is not a page which is not full of that self-reference which, in its truth and tact, constantly passes beyond itself and holds up the mirror to universal human nature. In reading the _Satires_ we all read our own minds and hearts.