The _Satires_ and _Epistles_ differ somewhat in form, in elaboration, and in metrical treatment, but on the whole they have sufficient resemblance to be considered together. The Horatian satire is _sui generis_. In the familiar modern sense it is not satire at all. The censorious spirit that finds nothing to praise, everything to ridicule, is quite alien to Horace. Neither Persius nor Juvenal, Boileau nor Pope, bears any real resemblance to him. The two former were satirists in the modern sense; the two latter have caught what we may call the _town_ side of Horace, but they are accomplished epigrammatists and rhetoricians, which he is not, and they entirely lack his strong love for the simple and the rural. Horace is decidedly the least rhetorical of all Roman poets. His taste is as free from the contamination of the basilica [65] as it is from that of Alexandrinism. As in lyric poetry he went straight to the fountain-head, seeking models among the bards of old Greece, so in his _prose-poetry_, as he calls the _Satires_, [66] he draws from the well of real experience, departing from it neither to the right hand nor to the left. This is what gives his works their lasting value. They are all gold; in other words, they have been dug for. Refined gold all certainly are not, many of them are strikingly the reverse; for all sorts of subjects are treated by them, bad as well as good. The poet professes to have no settled plan, but to wander from subject to subject, as the humour or the train of thought leads him; as Plato says-- _opae an o logos agoi, tautae iteon_.