mself as the
landscape of the Sabine farm. Horace the spectator sees Horace the man
against the background of human life just as he sees snow-mantled
Soracte, or the cold Digentia, or the restless Adriatic, or leafy
Tarentum, or snowy Algidus, or green Venafrum. The clear-cut elegance of
his miniatures of Italian scenery is not due to their individual
interest, but to their connection with the universal life of man.
Description for its own sake is hardly to be found in Horace. In the
same way, the vivid glimpses he affords of his own life, person, and
character almost never prompt the thought of egotism. The most personal
of poets, his expression of self nowhere becomes selfish expression.

But there are spectators who are mere spectators. Horace is more; he is
a critic and an interpreter. He looks forth upon life with a keen vision
for comparative values, and gives sane and distinct expression to what
he sees.

Horace must not be thought of, however, as a censorious or carping
critic. His attitude is judicial, and the verdict is seldom other than
lenient and kindly. He is not a wasp of Twickenham, not a Juvenal
furiously laying about him with a heavy lash, not a Lucilius with the
axes of Scipionic patrons to grind, having at the leaders of the people
and the people themselves. He is in as little degree an Ennius,
composing merely to gratify the taste for entertainment. There are some,
as a matter of fact, to whom in satire he seems to go beyond the limit
of good-nature. At vice in pronounced form, at all forms of unmanliness,
he does indeed strike out, like Lucilius the knight of Campania, his
predecessor and pattern, gracious only to virtue and to the friends of
virtue; but those whose hands are clean and whose hearts are pure need
fear nothing. Even those who are guilty of the ordinary frailties of
human kind need fear nothing worse than being good-humoredly laughed at.
The objects of Horace's smiling condemnation are not the trifling faults
of the individual or the class, but the universal grosser stupidities
which poison the sources of life.

The Horace of the _Satires_ and _Epistles_ is better called an essayist.
That he is a satirist at all is less by virtue of intention than because
of the mere fact that he is a spectator. To look upon life with the eye
of understanding is to see men the prey to passions and delusions,--the
very comment on which can be nothing else than satire.

And now, what is it that Hora