Who can help loving this antique world Horace shows, which keeps so much that is fine? We love it too because it had no shadows. It was content. We love its persistent search for joy, its disdain of the unworthy. We love conviction that life is supreme. Puritanism, a narrow morality, have driven it away. They have given nothing worth while in return. The reformer has driven out the uninsistent Greek. The worshippers of the spirit have done violence to worshippers of the flesh. Beauty is one of the few values. We should be grateful for any reality. Perfection of line is not bad morality. It is at least substitute for folly. In most modern art except that which France created, there is something crude, unseizable. Some wild homesickness! At heart, republican France has always been pagan, aristocratic. It has led nations in the arts. One reason the human race is no more beautiful is because men have ceased to desire it. It is becoming a negligible quality. Beauty was commoner in pagan days because men loved it. Who would not prefer the swiftly sketched picture of a vanished city made by such happy observers as Horace, Seneca, Catullus, to travelers’ descriptions! The best picture of Rome of Augustus is in his verse. It would be interesting to know what material world the reader pictures from the verses. No two see alike. One sees, as Heine remarked, with bitter glance of an Archenholz, one with inspired eyes of a Corinne, rarely one with clear Greek eyes of a Goethe. Who can not picture the circus, shows, baths, the ex-slave Menas made knight, dragging a robe three ells long? Syrian flute-players, and cameo-faced Roman women hastening stealthily to the temple of forbidden, alluring Egyptian gods! He gives good reproduction of the age. He saw its pomp. He enjoyed frivolities. He measured the fleeting shadows of change that were sweeping over it, without caring what the end might be. He lived and loved and he did not regret. I have caught vivid, delightful glimpses of Augustan Rome. I am grateful for the clear, unprejudiced eyes which preserved it. He had no bias of mind to make things other than they are. For him, in joy, there were no regrets. These unemotional poems are the one door that lets us into the Imperial City, that Augustus and Virgil, and Faustine of the unforgettable face and cruel heart, and dissolute Verus, knew. At other times reading Horace is like holding marble miniatures. No matter how subjectively he may write of his occupations, description makes him a plastic artist. Some of the poems are little cameo chains strung upon a ribbon. Such for instance as the faun who chases fleeing nymphs. (Carmen xviii, Book III.), Cytherean Venus dancing by moonlight, surrounded by Graces. (Ode IV.) “Pallas fitting her helmet, shield, and her fury.” “The Corybantes, redoubling strokes upon the cymbals.” “Chloris, shining with fair shoulders in the midnight sea.”