phrase of the law, "Thou shalt not covet "-nil admirari. Be moderate in your wishes, your actions, and your thoughts. Temperance is every thing. Holding this truth, man can be happy under any circumstances; without it, he can be happy under none. The changeable wishes of foolish mortals are no true index of that which really suits them, and if granted by Fortune, laughing mischievously in her sleeve, are not unfrequently the sources of their greatest unhappiness. The pleasures of the present hour as it flies, and the memories of the past, are to be enjoyed, without unprofitable anxiety for what the future may or may not bring; and whatever the future does bring, it is better, and happier, and wiser to bear cheerfully when it comes. There is a time for every thing in life, and a time to have done with living. From the kingly palace or the poor man's hovel, we are all under notice to quit our present tenements at some undetermined date, and to follow Numa and Ancus, and the atavi reges, to wherever it is that they have gone before-to Charon's boat, the further side of Styx, the realms of Proserpine, the domus exilis Plutonia, or whatever else old Greek fables teach us to call it; and when once there, we are nothing more than pulvis et umbra-dust and a shade. In the mean time we are here; and we are foolish if we do not make the best of the world we are in. The varieties of human character are as perplexing and inscrutable, and as much beyond our power radically to change, as the varieties of individual destiny. In both cases we are bound to accept easily and good-humouredly what we cannot alter. Every man is one of a crowd, and should train himself to fit into his place; and then, crowd as there is, there is room for each and all to live and to find life worth living. The earth and its good things belong to no one more securely or inalienably than to his neighbour; and the enjoyment of them is limited both for rich and poor to a short temporary use. When once we have left our little villa or our lofty palace, our cellar stocked with choice Falernian or cheap Sabine wine, the trees we have planted and the pleasing wife we have loved, for the shades of Orcus which loom round every corner of life, a new generation, a vivacior hæres, will take our place, and disport itself as strangely and as briefly as we have done our selves. To our own selves it will then matter not a whit whether we have been rich nobles or mighty kings, nor even wise and philosophic souls, whose thoughts have reached beyond the stars. A monument of those our best thoughts and deeds may indeed survive us in the minds of men; but to the thinker of the thought and doer of the deed it will be all one by that time and for ever. Even that unsubstantial gratification, the glimmering glory of our posthumous fame, is one which we must take by anticipation in the present, or we shall never take it at all. Our soul shall no more taste it on the further shores of Styx, than our ashes in the funeral urn, or another living body reformed out of the atoms of which we are now composed, will be conscious of the wine we are drinking to-day. Therefore eat and drink, in moderation always, -be merry and wise; or, as Mr. Martin admirably translates the familiar and graceful ode, Tu ne quæsieris,— "Ask not of fate to show ye Such lore is not for man- Shall round life's little span. Both thou and I Must quickly die! Content thee, then, nor madly hope To wrest a false assurance from Chaldean horoscope. Far nobler, better were it, Or this shall be The last, that now with sullen roar Scatters the Tuscan surge in foam upon the rock-bound shore. Be wise, your spirit firing Use all life's powers, The envious hours Fly as we talk: then live to-day, Nor fondly to to-morrow trust more than you must and may." Scire nefas. Let us not worry ourselves with peering into a subject which fate has hidden under an impenetrable veil. With such a creed, with no irrepressible yearning to believe in or speculate upon a future phase of existence as a continuation or consequence of our being here, no anxiety to convince himself that the problem of the universe was larger and more complex than it appeared to his own senses, it follows easily that Horace should have been an indifferent church-goer, as he calls himself,—a parcus Deorum cultor et infrequens. Why should he have been otherwise? The gods, if there were gods, were to Epicurus and his followers merely admirable as "models of being," as the ideal of imperturbable mental serenity, and freedom from labour or care. Even were it the fact that they had taken a share in the creation and government of the world, instead of smiling in secret indifference at the windy ways of men, they could give such as him little beyond actual life which he could not give himself. Their nature and their position in regard of man were clearly not within the scope of any investigation within his power to make; and Horace was too much of a positivist to waste his fancy or his faith on what he could not prove. The phenomena within his own experience limited the bases of his belief. Whatever it might be that guided the world, he could not trace in that guidance any such special purpose or general law of providence as should bring his own spirit into personal relation with an unseen, all-wise, or all-powerful creator and governor. The highest visible incarnation of a governing spirit which he did recognise was perhaps the man whose firm hand had crushed the civil strife which for so large a part of Horace's youth was rending in pieces all the civilised world in which a Roman took an interest. Even he, the august Emperor of Rome, would be obliged by some superior impersonal power sooner or later to "return heavenwards," and leave the destinies of the Roman state to other hands. Duty, therefore, towards the gods, as such, there would be in Horace's view little or none. No reciprocity existed which should give them a ground to claim it of him; nor any fear of punishment after death which should lead him to practise the cult of a superstitious reverence not founded upon duty. But his moral scheme was filled out and pervaded by the strongest sense of what was due to himself and to those who came in contact with him. The touches of kindly morality, rigid honesty, and firm independence, which so often meet us in the perusal of the odes and epistles, indicate a rule of life of which the faithful observance might well send a man of Horace's temper to his death-bed at fifty-seven in the sincere and satisfied belief that he had done what he had been called upon to do. The exquisite lament for his friend Quintilius perhaps expresses most fully the type of virtue which he cherished at his heart: "Ergo Quintilium perpetuus sopor paraphrased as follows by Mr. Martin, with considerable beauty of expression, but not with a force or compactness comparable to those of the original: "And hath the sleep, that knows no waking morn, Closed o'er Quintilius, our Quintilius dear? Where shall be found the man of woman born So simply meek, and yet so sternly just, Of faith so pure, and all so absolute of trust ?" Openness and truth, unblenching strictness of faith and justice, and the almost untranslatably deep self-reverence contained in the word pudor,-these are the qualities which crown the man whose death is to be wept for by the good. And for a man's own sake he must keep these qualities in exercise. His duty to himself binds him to forgive himself nothingni conscire sibi -to keep his heart from all wrong or baseness whatever.. To his neighbour his duty is, in a word, charity. He must be a good fellow-gratus amicis-in his social intercourse; he must overlook the little failings of his friends, and be blind to whatever may be the drawbacks of their company; he must not weary their sympathies with complaints of the inevitable mischiefs of time cr other calamities personal to himself; he must grow kindlier and more mellow as old age creeps on him, and count his birthdays more cheerfully as they come round and round. Ready as he should be to depart this life at any moment, he should be equally ready to take his part in the enjoyment of all that may yet be in store. The calm and constant remembrance of the possibility that every dawn may have been the last he shall see, will teach him neither to lose the day nor to be over-hasty in the pursuit of pleasure. And when the last dawn really has come, he should leave the entertainment of life (uti conviva satur) as gracefully and cheerfully as a well-filled and satisfied guest rises from table. "As gentle and as jocund as to jest," he should take his departure for the place where there is no more jesting. He has had his turn to act, and perhaps to live over his life again in memory. His pageant has come to its destined close, and those behind him have now to play out their play. Such is the general view of life, its advantages and its responsibilities, which Horace's poems enforce, in every variety of phrase, sentiment, and allusion. It may be, as has been said, narrow in scope, and apparently resting on a narrow basis of easily-satisfied speculation; but for all who are content to be thus easily satisfied, nothing could be more complete, more rounded, or more satisfactory, as far as it goes. It is only now and then, as in the elegy over Quintilius already referred to, that it appears possible to trace a shade of dissatisfaction, and even of doubt, coming for a moment over the poet's mind, as he contemplates the idea of absolute personal annihilation involved in the theory which ordinarily suited him so well. It was easy for him to repeat and to rest content in the noble lines of his teacher in physics : "Sic, ubi non erimus, quum corporis atque animai as a logical and conclusive exposition of a general and selfevident law. But the sharp and inexplicable consciousness of individual loss in the departure of the friend whose moral image and personality were so vividly stamped upon his mind seem to have struck Høiece, as a similar event strikes some one or other among us every day. Is it possible, that that noble being, that tam carum caput, whom I knew yesterday as Quintilius, is gone for ever, and gone nowhere? Can it be, that the sleep which to-day weighs down his eyes is an endless one? Orpheus himself could not bring him back again; so much we know, but we know and can know no more. Durum; if it be so, it is hard indeed:-and in the feeling of its being hard lies the germ of the recognition that it is impossible. Further than this Horace could not go. He turns to the old strain again. Hard or not, absolute or not, as the loss may be, we must bear it so as to lighten our feeling of it. What can't be cured must be endured. It is not within the laws of our being to mend; yet in the mean time levius fit patientia. At the risk of quoting what most of our readers probably know so familiarly in its original shape and in Dryden's version, that they may be inclined to question its new form most critically, we reproduce here part of the celebrated ode to Mæcenas (Tyrrhena regum progenies), as translated by Mr. Martin. It contains the gist of Horace's philosophy as applied to the conditions of life; and the success with which it has borne a second modern translation marks the perpetual freshness of the thread of thought, and of the style in which the thought is so carefully entwined. "Most wisely Jove in thickest night The issues of the future veils, And laughs at the self-torturing wight, The present only is thine own, Then use it well, ere it has flown. All else which may by time be bred Now whirling onwards, fierce and fast, When lashing rains among the hills Lord of himself that man will be Let Jove to-morrow, if he will, |
