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Ebook has 528 lines and 59886 words, and 11 pages

Happy the man, in busy schemes unskilled, Who, living simply, like our sires of old, Tills the few acres, which his father tilled, Vexed by no thoughts of usury or gold;

The shrilling clarion ne'er his slumber mars, Nor quails he at the howl of angry seas; He shuns the forum, with its wordy jars, Nor at a great man's door consents to freeze.

The tender vine-shoots, budding into life, He with the stately poplar-tree doth wed, Lopping the fruitless branches with his knife, And grafting shoots of promise in their stead;

Or in some valley, up among the hills, Watches his wandering herds of lowing kine, Or fragrant jars with liquid honey fills, Or shears his silly sheep in sunny shine;

Or when Autumnus o'er the smiling land Lifts up his head with rosy apples crowned, Joyful he plucks the pears, which erst his hand Graffed on the stem they're weighing to the ground;

Plucks grapes in noble clusters purple-dyed, A gift for thee, Priapus, and for thee, Father Sylvanus, where thou dost preside, Warding his bounds beneath thy sacred tree.

Now he may stretch his careless limbs to rest, Where some old ilex spreads its sacred roof; Now in the sunshine lie, as likes him best, On grassy turf of close elastic woof.

And streams the while glide on with murmurs low, And birds are singing 'mong the thickets deep, And fountains babble, sparkling as they flow, And with their noise invite to gentle sleep.

But when grim winter comes, and o'er his grounds Scatters its biting snows with angry roar, He takes the field, and with a cry of hounds Hunts down into the toils the foaming boar;

Or seeks the thrush, poor starveling, to ensnare, In filmy net with bait delusive stored, Entraps the travelled crane, and timorous hare, Rare dainties these to glad his frugal board.

Who amid joys like these would not forget The pangs which love to all its victims bears, The fever of the brain, the ceaseless fret, And all the heart's lamentings and despairs?

But if a chaste and blooming wife, beside, The cheerful home with sweet young blossoms fills, Like some stout Sabine, or the sunburnt bride Of the lithe peasant of the Apulian hills,

Who piles the hearth with logs well dried and old Against the coming of her wearied lord, And, when at eve the cattle seek the fold, Drains their full udders of the milky hoard;

And bringing forth from her well-tended store A jar of wine, the vintage of the year, Spreads an unpurchased feast,--oh then, not more Could choicest Lucrine oysters give me cheer,

Or the rich turbot, or the dainty char, If ever to our bays the winter's blast Should drive them in its fury from afar; Nor were to me a welcomer repast

The Afric hen or the Ionic snipe, Than olives newly gathered from the tree, That hangs abroad its clusters rich and ripe, Or sorrel, that doth love the pleasant lea,

Or mallows wholesome for the body's need, Or lamb foredoomed upon some festal day In offering to the guardian gods to bleed, Or kidling which the wolf hath marked for prey.

What joy, amidst such feasts, to see the sheep, Full of the pasture, hurrying homewards come; To see the wearied oxen, as they creep, Dragging the upturned ploughshare slowly home!

Or, ranged around the bright and blazing hearth, To see the hinds, a house's surest wealth, Beguile the evening with their simple mirth, And all the cheerfulness of rosy health!

Thus spake the miser Alphius; and, bent Upon a country life, called in amain The money he at usury had lent;-- But ere the month was out, 'twas lent again.

In this charming sketch of the peasant's life it is easy to see that Horace is drawing from nature, like Burns in his more elaborate picture of the "Cottar's Saturday Night." Horace had obviously watched closely the ways of the peasantry round his Apulian home, as he did at a later date those of the Sabine country, and to this we owe many of the most delightful passages in his works. He omits no opportunity of contrasting their purity of morals, and the austere self-denial of their life, with the luxurious habits and reckless vice of the city life of Rome. Thus, in one of the finest of his Odes , after painting with a few masterly strokes what the matrons and the fast young ladies of the imperial city had become, it was not from such as these, he continues, that the noble youth sprang "who dyed the seas with Carthaginian gore, overthrew Pyrrhus and great Antiochus and direful Hannibal," concluding in words which contrast by their suggestive terseness at the same time that they suggest comparison with the elaborated fulness of the epode just quoted:--

"But they, of rustic warriors wight The manly offspring, learned to smite The soil with Sabine spade, And faggots they had cut, to bear Home from the forest, whensoe'er An austere mother bade;

"What time the sun began to change The shadows through the mountain range, And took the yoke away From the o'erwearied oxen, and His parting car proclaimed at hand The kindliest hour of day."

The speculations as to who and what Canidia was, in which scholars have run riot, are conspicuous for absurdity, even among the wild and ridiculous conjectures as to the personages named by Horace in which the commentators have indulged. That some well-known person was the original of Canidia is extremely probable, for professors of witchcraft abounded at the time, combining very frequently, like their modern successors, the arts of Medea with the attributes of Dame Quickly. What more natural than for a young poet to work up an effective picture out of the abundant suggestions which the current stories of such creatures and their doings presented to his hand? The popular belief in their power, the picturesque conditions under which their spells were wrought, the wild passions in which lay the secret of their hold upon the credulity of their victims, offered to the Roman poet, just as they did to our own Elizabethan dramatists, a combination of materials most favourable for poetic treatment. But that Horace had, as many of his critics contend, a feeling of personal vanity, the pique of a discarded lover, to avenge, is an assumption wholly without warrant. He was the last man, at any time or under any circumstances, to have had any relations of a personal nature with a woman of Canidia's class. However inclined he may have been to use her and her practices for poetic purposes, he manifestly not only saw through the absurdity of her pretensions, but laughed at her miserable impotence, and meant that others should do the same. It seems to be impossible to read the 8th of his First Book of his Satires, and not come to this conclusion. That satire consists of the monologue of a garden god, set up in the garden which Maecenas had begun to lay out on the Esquiline Hill. This spot had until recently been the burial-ground of the Roman poor, a quarter noisome by day, and the haunt of thieves and beasts of prey by night. On this obscene spot, littered with skulls and dead men's bones, Canidia and her accomplice Sagana are again introduced, digging a pit with their nails, into which they pour the blood of a coal-black ewe, which they had previously torn limb-meal,

"So to evoke the shade and soul Of dead men, and from these to wring Responses to their questioning."

They have with them two effigies, one of wax and the other of wool--the latter the larger of the two, and overbearing the other, which cowers before it,

"Like one that stands Beseeching in the hangman's hands. On Hecate one, Tisiphone The other calls; and you might see Serpents and hell-hounds thread the dark, Whilst, these vile orgies not to mark, The moon, all bloody red of hue, Behind the massive tombs withdrew."

The hags pursue their incantations; higher and higher flames their ghastly fire, and the grizzled wolves and spotted snakes slink in terror to their holes, as the shrieks and muttered spells of the beldams make the moon-forsaken night more hideous. But after piling up his horrors with the most elaborate skill, as if in the view of some terrible climax, the poet makes them collapse into utter farce. Disgusted by their intrusion on his privacy, the Priapus adopts a simple but exceedingly vulgar expedient to alarm these appalling hags. In an instant they fall into the most abject terror, suspend their incantations, and, tucking up their skirts, make off for the more comfortable quarters of the city as fast as their trembling limbs can carry them--Canidia, the great enchantress, dropping her false teeth, and her attendant Sagana parting company with her wig, by the way:--

"While you With laughter long and loud might view Their herbs, and charmed adders wound In mystic coils, bestrew the ground."

And yet grave scholars gravely ask us to believe that Canidia was an old mistress of the poet's! These poems evidently made a success, and Horace returned to the theme in his 17th Epode. Here he writes as though he had been put under a spell by Canidia, in revenge for his former calumnies about her.

"My youth has fled, my rosy hue Turned to a wan and livid blue; Blanched by thy mixtures is my hair; No respite have I from despair. The days and nights, they wax and wane, Yet bring me no release from pain; Nor can I ease, howe'er I gasp, The spasm, which holds me in its grasp."

Here we have all the well-known symptoms of a man under a malign magical influence. In this extremity Horace affects to recant all the mischief he has formerly spoken of the enchantress. Let her name what penance he will, he is ready to perform it. If a hundred steers will appease her wrath, they are hers; or if she prefers to be sung of as the chaste and good, and to range above the spheres as a golden star, his lyre is at her service. Her parentage is as unexceptionable as her life is pure, but while ostentatiously disclaiming his libels, the poet takes care to insinuate them anew, by apostrophising her in conclusion, thus:--

"Thou who dost ne'er in haglike wont Among the tombs of paupers hunt For ashes newly laid in ground, Love-charms and philtres to compound, Thy heart is gentle, pure thy hands."

Of course, Canidia is not mollified by such a recantation as this. The man who,

"Branding her name with ill renown, Made her the talk of all the town,"

is not so lightly to be forgiven.

"You'd have a speedy doom? But no, It shall be lingering, sharp, and slow."

The pangs of Tantalus, of Prometheus, or of Sisyphus are but the types of what his shall be. Let him try to hang, drown, stab himself--his efforts will be vain:--

"Then comes my hour of triumph, then I'll goad you till you writhe again; Then shall you curse the evil hour You made a mockery of my power."

She then triumphantly reasserts the powers to which she lays claim. What! I, she exclaims, who can waste life as the waxen image of my victim melts before my magic fire --I, who can bring down the moon from her sphere, evoke the dead from their ashes, and turn the affections by my philtres,--

"Shall I my potent art bemoan As impotent 'gainst thee alone?"

Surely all this is as purely the work of imagination as Middleton's "Witch," or the Hags in "Macbeth," or in Goethe's 'Faust.' Horace used Canidia as a byword for all that was hateful in the creatures of her craft, filthy as they were in their lives and odious in their persons. His literary and other friends were as familiar with her name in this sense as we are with those of Squeers and Micawber, as types of a class; and the joke was well understood when, many years after, in the 8th of his Second Book of Satires, he said that Nasidienus's dinner-party broke up without their eating a morsel of the dishes after a certain point,--"As if a pestilential blast from Canidia's throat, more venomous than that of African vipers, had swept across them."

An old delusion. We find it in Theocritus, where a girl, forsaken by her lover, resorts to the same desperate restorative --

"As this image of wax I melt here by aidance demonic, Myndian Delphis shall so melt with love's passion anon."

Again Ovid makes Hypsipyle say of Medea:

"The absent she binds with her spells, and figures of wax she devises, And in their agonised spleen fine-pointed needles she thrusts."

INTRODUCTION TO MAECENAS.--THE JOURNEY TO BRUNDUSIUM.

Horace had not been long in Rome, after his return from Greece, before he had made himself a name. With what he got from the booksellers, or possibly by the help of friends, he had purchased a patent place in the Quaestor's department, a sort of clerkship of the Treasury, which he continued to hold for many years, if not indeed to the close of his life. The duties were light, but they demanded, and at all events had, his occasional attention, even after he was otherwise provided for. Being his own--bought by his own money--it may have gratified his love of independence to feel that, if the worst came to the worst, he had his official salary to fall back upon. Among his friends, men of letters are at this time, as might have been expected, found to be most conspicuous. Virgil, who had recently been despoiled, like, himself, of his paternal property, took occasion to bring his name before Maecenas, the confidential adviser and minister of Octavius, in whom he had himself found a helpful friend. This was followed up by the commendation of Varius, already celebrated as a writer of Epic poetry, and whose tragedy of "Thyestes," if we are to trust Quintilian, was not unworthy to rank with the best tragedies of Greece. Maecenas may not at first have been too well disposed towards a follower of the republican party, who had not been sparing of his satire against many of the supporters and favourites of Octavius. He sent for Horace, however , and any prejudice on this score, if prejudice there was, was ultimately got over. Maecenas took time to form his estimate of the man, and it was not till nine months after their first interview that he sent for Horace again. When he did so, however, it was to ask him to consider himself for the future among the number of his friends. This part of Horace's story is told with admirable brevity and good feeling in the Satire from which we have already quoted, addressed to Maecenas a few years afterwards.

"Lucky I will not call myself, as though Thy friendship I to mere good fortune owe. No chance it was secured me thy regards, But Virgil first, that best of men and bards, And then kind Varius mentioned what I was. Before you brought, with many a faltering pause, Dropping some few brief words I did not profess That I was sprung of lineage old and great, Or used to canter round my own estate On Satureian barb, but what and who I was as plainly told. As usual, you Brief answer make me. I retire, and then, Some nine months after, summoning me again, You bid me 'mongst your friends assume a place: And proud I feel that thus I won your grace, Not by an ancestry long known to fame, But by my life, and heart devoid of blame."

"No house more free from all that's base, In none cabals more out of place. It hurts me not, if others be More rich, or better read than me; Each has his place."

Like many of his contemporaries, who were eminent in political life, Maecenas devoted himself to active literary work--for he wrote much, and on a variety of topics. His taste in literature was, however, better than his execution. His style was diffuse, affected, and obscure; but Seneca, who tells us this, and gives some examples which justify the criticism, tells us at the same time that his genius was massive and masculine , and that he would have been eminent for eloquence, if fortune had not spoiled him. However vicious his own style may have been, the man who encouraged three such writers as Virgil, Propertius, and Horace, not to mention others of great repute, whose works have perished, was clearly a sound judge of a good style in others.

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