do. We may take our Horace from our pocket, and feel, as with our
Wordsworth at Dove Cottage, with our Scott at Ashestiel, that we are
gazing on the hills, the streams, and valleys, which received the primal
outpourings of their muse, and are for ever vocal with its memories.

[Illustration: THE SITE OF HORACE'S VILLA.]

From M. Rotondo, eastward to the Licenza, and southward to the
high ground of Roccogiovine, stretched apparently the poet's not
inconsiderable demesne. Part of it he let off to five peasants on the
_metayage_ system; the rest he cultivated himself, employing eight
slaves superintended by a bailiff. The house, he tells us, was simple,
with no marble pillars or gilded cornices (Od. II, xviii), but spacious
enough to receive and entertain a guest from town, and to welcome
occasionally his neighbours to a cheerful evening meal--"nights and
suppers as of gods" (Sat. II, vi, 65), he calls them; where the talk
was unfashionably clean and sensible, the fare beans and bacon, garden
stuff and chicory and mallows. Around the villa was a garden, not filled
with flowers, of which in one of his odes he expresses dislike as
unremunerative (Od. II, xv, 6), but laid out in small parallelograms
of grass, edged with box and planted with clipped hornbeam. The house
was shaded from above by a grove of ilexes and oaks; lower down were
orchards of olives, wild plums, cornels, apples. In the richer soil of
the valley he grew corn, whose harvests never failed him, and, like Eve
in Eden, led the vine to wed her elm. Against this last experiment his
bailiff grumbled, saying that the soil would grow spice and pepper as
soon as ripen grapes (Ep. I, xiv, 23); but his master persisted, and
succeeded. Inviting Maecenas to supper, he offers Sabine wine from his
own estate (Od. I, xx, 1); and visitors to-day, drinking the juice of
the native grape at the little Roccogiovine inn, will be of opinion with
M. de Florac, that "this little wine of the country has a most agreeable
smack." Here he sauntered day by day, watched his labourers, working
sometimes, like Ruskin at Hincksey, awkwardly to their amusement with
his own hands; strayed now and then into the lichened rocks and forest
wilds beyond his farm, surprised there one day by a huge wolf, who
luckily fled from his presence (Od. I, xxii, 9); or--most enjoyable of
all--lay beside spring or river with a book or friend of either sex.

A book of verses underneath the bough,
A loaf o