his laughter is not sardonic.
Sane judgment and generous experience tell him that the foibles of
mankind are his own as well as theirs, and are not to be changed by so
slight a means as a railing tongue. He reflects that what in himself has
produced no very disastrous results may without great danger be forgiven
also in them.

It is this intimate and warming quality in Horace that prompts Hagedorn
to call him "my friend, my teacher, my companion," and to take the poet
with him on country walks as if he were a living person:

Horaz, mein Freund, mein Lehrer, mein Begleiter,
Wir gehen aufs Land. Die Tage sind so heiter;

and Nietzsche to compare the atmosphere of the _Satires_ and _Epistles_
to the "geniality of a warm winter day"; and Wordsworth to be attracted
by his appreciation of "the value of companionable friendship"; and
Andrew Lang to address to him the most personal of literary letters; and
Austin Dobson to give his Horatian poems the form of personal address;
and countless students and scholars and men out of school and immersed
in the cares of life to carry Horace with them in leisure hours. _Circum
praecordia ludit_, "he plays about the heartstrings," said Persius, long
before any of these, when the actual Horace was still fresh in the
memory of men.

If we were to take detailed account of certain qualities missed in
Horace by the modern reader, we should be even more deeply convinced of
his power of personal attraction. He is not a Christian poet, but a
pagan. Faith in immortality and Providence, penitence and penance, and
humanitarian sentiment, are hardly to be found in his pages. He is
sometimes too unrestrained in expression. The unsympathetic or
unintelligent critic might charge him with being commonplace.

Yet these defects are more apparent than real, and have never been an
obstacle to souls attracted by Horace. His pages are charged with
sympathy for men. His lapses in taste are not numerous, and are, after
all, less offensive than those of European letters today, after the
coming of sin with the law. And he is not commonplace, but universal.
His content is familiar matter of today as well as of his own time. His
delightful natural settings are never novel, romantic, or forced; we
have seen them all, in experience or in literature, again and again, and
they make familiar and intimate appeal. Phidyle is neither ancient nor
modern, Latin nor Teuton; she is all of them at once. The exquisite
e