In Book III, Carmen xxix, what dainty, stepping through measures! What fastidious choosing! What fragile-pointed penciling! Sharp indeed, fine leaved, were the bristling thickets which hid the God, Sylvanus. Here is delicately modeled detail of French line engravers, such as Edelinck. Nowhere else is there such inspiring swinging up and slow, pensive drooping of moons, with such calm vistas. Moons are red gold. The sky is lapis, a Byzantine enamel. The delight when they swing to sight! Nowhere do they rise more majestically than with Latin poets. I like, too, his swift painting of forests, fields, _herds and the black hills of Acadia_, lofty Tusculum where wealthy Romans had country houses, and he went to banquet with his friends, or cool Lucanian pastures overlooking the Tuscan Sea; the ocean flowing among the shining Cyclades. His pictures are sure of line as an etching by Braquemond. They give some the same pleasure. They are crisp. They are oftenest of the outdoor world. Artists of all time have been indebted to this plastic picturing. When he describes wine foaming around white feet of laughing girls, we see a group by Donatello. When he paints Autumn crowned with vine-leaves, lifting his head above level plains, we see the richly colored, fluent art of Boucher. Might not the _oxen with weary necks dragging the inverted plowshare_ be from brush of Breton or L’Hermitte? Latin blood is there! In Horace there is appreciation of rustic life which French art realized. The order of descriptions is beautiful. One moment does not rush upon another. This is a Latin quality; nothing superimposed; nothing hurried. The influence of Horace, his spirit, is in art of France, Spain, Italy; but not in Holland or the north. There it met a counter current, which swept it back. In the north _the spirit_ triumphed. It is sanity of Latin races that periodically reclaims art from the crowded vagueness of the north, then shows it the way back to life, which is nature. Landscape painters of France, Italy, and Spain are spiritual descendants of Roman word-painters. Like them they have united love for the thing they saw with sufficient mental detachment to insure truth. The spirit of Horace is in landscapes of Rousseau, Harpignies, Daubigny, Corot. The same nature looks from the canvasses; the same truth. Love of thing they painted, singleness of purpose, with no momentary side-glancing, stamped success. Love, sincerity, were there, coupled with fidelity that outweighed price. Over these landscapes with their artistic well-being, rests sure tradition of Roman ancestry. In Horace, in Quintillian, we see beginning that perspicuity, sense of distinctions, that made Latin races—France in particular, supreme in criticism. There is in Horace a likeness to the French mind that blossomed in 1830.