the _Sermones_, and also when he wanted to have him for his secretary and he declined it: he could not have hidden from himself, that Horace was one of those who, notwithstanding all the good that he had done, would not forget his former life, and always judged of him by it. Wieland calls our attention to a letter of Augustus, in which he betrays how much he felt Horace’s indifference, and says, _An vereris ne apud posteros infame tibi sit quod videaris familiaris nobis esse?_ We can hardly have the odes in chronological order: some of them were written very early, perhaps even as far back as the time that he lived in Athens: of many indeed it is impossible to give the exact date; and though most of them were composed before the war of Actium, the first three books were not published till afterwards. Some of the _Sermones_ also belong to a very early period: the earliest that we have of his, is perhaps the banquet of Nasidienus, that is to say, Salvidienus, according to the undoubtedly correct remark of the scholiast; just as Malthinus stands for Mæcenas, so that the fictitious name has the same quantity as the real one. Against a man who had become unfortunate, Horace would not have written after his execution; and therefore the poem must date soon after the battle of Philippi, 710. To the last years of his life belong the fourth book of the Odes, and the second of the Epistles. Horace, as a poet, was once admired beyond all bounds; but for the last thirty years or more, he has not had justice done to him. His imitations from the Greeks are of wonderful beauty, and they have also much in them which is his own. Yet for all that he has many faults. When searching for an original expression, he sometimes contents himself with another which is none of the most appropriate or the most terse: if one keeps this remark well in mind, many of Bentley’s emendations fall to the ground. Moreover he has two great failings. One is quite annoyed at his misappreciation of the earlier writers; the times had quite changed, and hence he took a dislike to many things because they were strange in his day, more especially to archaisms. How he could have been blind to the merits of Plautus, is quite inconceivable: the age to which he belonged had wrought on him the same effects which difference of nationality has on other men; many an expression may have quite gone down to the common people, and thus have become vulgar, so that Horace was shocked by it. This feeling may have been much increased by his disgust at those who made a ridiculous parade of quaintness, playing the same farce as the exaggerated admirers of the middle ages among us. And besides this, painful is the impression which is made upon us by the irony of Horace’s Epicurean philosophy, owing to which he, in fact, looks upon everything as a folly, and tries to sneer at everything, treating what is most venerable with irreverence: this becomes at last a bad habit with him.