ant heart without
which assimilation of art is hardly less possible than creation.
Ignorance had descended upon the world, and gross darkness covered the
people. The classical authors were solid, the meat of vigorous minds.
Their language, never the facile language of the people and the
partially disciplined, now became a resisting medium that was foreign to
the general run of men. Their syntax was archaic and crabbed, their
metres forgotten. Their substance, never grasped without effort, was now
not only difficult, but became the abstruse matter of another people and
another age. To all but the cultivated few, they were known for anything
but what they really were. It was an age of Virgil the mysterious
prophet of the coming of Christ, of Virgil the necromancer. Real
knowledge withdrew to secret and secluded refuges.

If the classical authors in general were beyond the powers and outside
the affection of men, Horace was especially so. More intellectual than
Virgil, and less emotional, in metrical forms for the most part lost to
their knowledge and liking, the poet of the individual heart rather than
of men in the national or racial mass, the poet strictly of this world
and in no respect of the next, he almost vanished from the life of men.

Yet the classics were not all lost, and not even Horace perished.
Strange to say, and yet not really strange, the most potent active
influence in the destruction of his appeal to men was also the most
effective instrument of his preservation. Through the darkness and the
storms of the nine hundred years following the fall of the Western
Empire, Horace was sheltered under the wing of the Church.

It was a natural exaggeration for Christianity to begin by teaching
absolute separation from the world, and to declare, through the mouths
of such as Tertullian, that the blood of Christ alone sufficed and
nothing more was needed, and that literature and all the other arts of
paganism, together with its manners, were so inseparable from its
religion that every part was anathema. It was natural that Horace, more
than Virgil, should be the object of its neglect, and even of its active
enmity. Horace is the most completely pagan of poets whose works are of
spiritual import. The only immortality of which he takes account is the
immortality of fame. Aside from this, the end of man is dust and shadow.

It is true that in the depth of his heart he does not feel with
Democritus, Epicurus, and Luc