ography, controversy, sermons,
correspondence, even conversation,--all have come down to us from the
age of Milton either written in or so touched with Latin that one is
compelled to enter seventeenth century England by way of Rome as Rome
must be entered by way of Athens."

Great as was the vogue of Latin in the earlier centuries, it was the
first half of the eighteenth, the most critical period in English
letters, that realized to the full the virtues of Horace. His words in
the _Ars Poetica_ "were accepted, even more widely than the laws of
Aristotle, as the standard of critical judgment. Addison and Steele by
their choice of mottoes for their periodicals, Prior by his adoption of
a type of lyric that has since his time been designated as Horatian, and
Pope with his imposing series of _Imitations_, gave such an impulse to
the already widespread interest that it was carried on through the whole
of the century." "Horace may be said to pervade the literature of the
eighteenth century in three ways: as a teacher of political and social
morality; as a master of the art of poetry; and as a sort of _elegantiae
arbiter_." Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, and Fielding, Gay, Samuel
Johnson, Chesterfield, and Walpole, were all familiar with and fond of
Horace, and took him unto themselves.

In the nineteenth century, Wordsworth has an intimate familiarity with
Virgil, Catullus, and Horace, but loves Horace best; Coleridge thinks
highly of his literary criticism; Byron, who never was greatly fond of
him, frequently quotes him; Shelley reads him with pleasure; Browning's
_The Ring and the Book_ contains many quotations from him; Thackeray
makes use of phrases from the _Odes_ "with an ease and facility which
nothing but close intimacy could produce"; Andrew Lang addresses to him
the most charming of his _Letters to Dead Authors_; and Austin Dobson is
inspired by him in many of his exquisite poems in lighter vein. These
names, and those in the paragraphs preceding, are not all that might be
mentioned. The literature of England is honey-combed with the classic
authors in general, and Horace is among the foremost. Without him and
without the classics, a great part of our literary patrimony is of
little use.

_vi_. IN THE SCHOOLS

Of the place of Horace in the schools and universities of all these
countries, and of the world of western civilization in general, it is
hardly necessary to speak. The enlightened sentiment of the five h