eased Virgil
would have been with his rustic content!

The sudden thought brought a smile to his eyes and then a shadow.
Virgil had been dead more than ten years, but his loss seemed all
at once a freshly grievous thing. So much that was valuable in his
life was inextricably associated with him. Horace's mind, usually
sanely absorbed in present interests, began, because of a trick of
memory, to turn more and more toward the past. Virgil had been one
of the first to help him out of the bitterness that made him a rather
gloomy young man when the Republic was defeated, and his own little
property dissipated, and had introduced him to Maecenas, the source
of all his material prosperity and of much of his happiness. And
indeed he had justified Virgil's faith, Horace said to himself with
a certain pride. He had begun as the obscure son of a freedman, and
here he was now, after fifty, one of the most successful poets of
Rome, a friend of Augustus, a person of importance in important
circles, and withal a contented man.

This last achievement he knew to be the most difficult, as it was
the most unusual. And there in the clarifying sunshine he said to
himself that the rich treasure of his content had been bought by noble
coin: by his temperance and good sense in a luxurious society, by
his self-respecting independence in a circle of rich patrons, and
perhaps, above all, by his austerely honest work among many
temptations to debase the gift the Muses had bestowed upon him. He
had had no Stoic contempt for the outward things of this world. Indeed,
after he had frankly accepted the Empire he came to feel a pride in
the glory of Augustus's reign, as he felt a deep, reconciling
satisfaction in its peace, its efforts at restoring public morals,
its genuine insistence on a renewed purity of national life. The
outward tokens of increasing wealth charmed his eyes, and he took
the keenest pleasure in the gorgeous marble pillars and porticoes
of many of the houses he frequented, in the beautiful statues, the
bronze figures, the tapestries, the gold and silver vessels owned
by many of his friends, and in the rich appointments and the perfect
service of their dining-rooms, where he was a familiar guest. But
he had never wanted these things for himself, any more than he wished
for a pedigree and the images of ancestors to adorn lofty halls. He
came away from splendid houses more than willing to fall back into
plainer ways. Neither had he e