vessel, let me be borne uniform and the same. I am not wafted with
swelling sail before the north wind blowing fair: yet I do not bear my
course of life against the adverse south. In force, genius, figure,
virtue, station, estate, the last of the first-rate, [yet] still before
those of the last.

You are not covetous, [you say]:--go to.--What then? Have the rest of
your vices fled from you, together with this? Is your breast free from
vain ambition? Is it free from the fear of death and from anger? Can you
laugh at dreams, magic terrors, wonders, witches, nocturnal goblins, and
Thessalian prodigies? Do you number your birth-days with a grateful
mind? Are you forgiving to your friends? Do you grow milder and better
as old age approaches? What profits you only one thorn eradicated out of
many? If you do not know how to live in a right manner, make way for
those that do. You have played enough, eaten and drunk enough, it is
time for you to walk off: lest having tippled too plentifully, that age
which plays the wanton with more propriety, and drive you [off the
stage].

* * * * *

HORACE'S BOOK UPON THE ART OF POETRY.

TO THE PISOS.

If a painter should wish to unite a horse's neck to a human head, and
spread a variety of plumage over limbs [of different animals] taken from
every part [of nature], so that what is a beautiful woman in the upper
part terminates unsightly in an ugly fish below; could you, my friends,
refrain from laughter, were you admitted to such a sight? Believe, ye
Pisos, the book will be perfectly like such a picture, the ideas of
which, like a sick man's dreams, are all vain and fictitious: so that
neither head nor foot can correspond to any one form. "Poets and
painters [you will say] have ever had equal authority for attempting any
thing." We are conscious of this, and this privilege we demand and allow
in turn: but not to such a degree, that the tame should associate with
the savage; nor that serpents should be coupled with birds, lambs with
tigers.

In pompous introductions, and such as promise a great deal, it generally
happens that one or two verses of purple patch-work, that may make a
great show, are tagged on; as when the grove and the altar of Diana and
the meandering of a current hastening through pleasant fields, or the
river Rhine, or the rainbow is described. But here there was no room for
these [fine things]: perhaps, too, you know how to dra