ve known so well as you, Horace, how happy and fortunate a
thing it was to be born in Italy. You do not say so, like your Virgil,
in one splendid passage, numbering the glories of the land as a lover
might count the perfections of his mistress. But the sentiment is ever
in your heart and often on your lips.

Me nec tam patiens Lacedaemon,
Nec tam Larissae percussit campus opimae,
Quam domus Albuneae resonantis
Et praeceps Anio, ac Tiburni lucus, et uda
Mobilibus pomaria rivis. (1)

(1) 'Me neither resolute Sparta nor the rich Larissaean
plain so enraptures as the fane of echoing Albunea, the
headlong Anio, the grove of Tibur, the orchards watered by
the wandering rills.

So a poet should speak, and to every singer his own land should be
dearest. Beautiful is Italy with the grave and delicate outlines of her
sacred hills, her dark groves, her little cities perched like eyries on
the crags, her rivers gliding under ancient walls; beautiful is Italy,
her seas, and her suns: but dearer to me the long grey wave that bites
the rock below the minster in the north; dearer is the barren moor and
black peat-water swirling in tanny foam, and the scent of bog myrtle
and the bloom of heather, and, watching over the lochs, the green
round-shouldered hills.

In affection for your native land, Horace, certainly the pride in great
Romans dead and gone made part, and you were, in all senses, a lover
of your country, your country's heroes, your country's gods. None but a
patriot could have sung that ode on Regulus, who died, as our own hero
died, on an evil day for the honour of Rome, as Gordon for the honour of
England.

Fertur pudicae conjujis osculum,
Parvosque natos, ut capitis minor,
Ab se removisse, et virilem
Torvus humi pusuisse voltum:

Donec labantes consilio patres
Firmaret auctor nunquam alias dato,
Interque maerentes amicos
Egregius properaret exul.

Atqui sciebat, quae sibi barbarus
Tortor pararet: non aliter tamen
Dimovit obstantes propinquos,
Et populum reditus morantem,

Quam si clientum longa negotia
Dijudicata lite relinqueret,
Tendens Venafranos in agros
Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum. (1)

(1) 'They say he put aside from him the pure lips of his wife and
his little children, like a man unfree, and with his brave face bowed
earthward sternly he waited till with such counsel as never mortal gave
he might strengthen the hearts of the Fathers, an