undred
years since the death of Petrarch has been enthusiastic in the
conviction that the Greek and Latin classics are indispensable to
instruction of the first quality, and that among them Horace is of
exceeding value as a model of poetic taste and as an influence in the
formation of a philosophy of life. If his place has been less secure in
latter days, it is due less to alteration of that conviction than to
extension of the educational system to the utilitarian arts and
sciences, and to the passing of educational control from the few to the
general average.

III. HORACE THE DYNAMIC

THE CULTIVATED FEW

We have followed in such manner and at such length as is possible for
our purpose the fortunes of Horace through the ages from his death and
the death of the Empire in whose service his pen was employed to our own
times. We have seen that he never was really forgotten, and that there
never was a time of long duration when he ceased to be of real
importance to some portion of mankind.

The recital of historical fact is at best a narration of circumstance to
which there clings little of the warmth of life. An historical event
itself is but the cumulated and often frigid result of intimate original
forces that may have meant long travail of body and soul before the act
of realization became possible. The record of the event in chronicle or
its commemoration in monument is only the sign that at some time there
occurred a significant moment rendered inevitable by previous stirrings
of life whose intensity, if not whose very identity, are forgotten or no
longer realized.

Thus the enumeration of manuscript revisions, translations, imitations,
and scholastic editions of Horace may also seem at first sight the
narrative of cold detail. There may be readers who, remembering the
scant stream of the cultivated few who tided the poet through the
centuries of darkness, and the comparative rareness of cultivated men at
all times, will be slow to be convinced of any real impress of Horace
upon the life of men. They especially who reflect that during all the
long sweep of time the majority of those who have known him, and even of
those who have been stirred to enthusiasm by him, have known him through
the compulsion of the school, and who reflect farther on the
artificialities, the insincerities, the pettinesses, the abuses, and the
hatreds of the class-room, the joy with which at the end the text-book
is dropped or bid