You are not covetous, [you say]:—­go to.—­What then?  Have the rest of your vices fled from you, together with this?  Is your breast free from vain ambition?  Is it free from the fear of death and from anger?  Can you laugh at dreams, magic terrors, wonders, witches, nocturnal goblins, and Thessalian prodigies?  Do you number your birth-days with a grateful mind?  Are you forgiving to your friends?  Do you grow milder and better as old age approaches?  What profits you only one thorn eradicated out of many?  If you do not know how to live in a right manner, make way for those that do.  You have played enough, eaten and drunk enough, it is time for you to walk off:  lest having tippled too plentifully, that age which plays the wanton with more propriety, and drive you [off the stage].

* * * * *

HORACE’S BOOK UPON THE ART OF POETRY.

TO THE PISOS.

If a painter should wish to unite a horse’s neck to a human head, and spread a variety of plumage over limbs [of different animals] taken from every part [of nature], so that what is a beautiful woman in the upper part terminates unsightly in an ugly fish below; could you, my friends, refrain from laughter, were you admitted to such a sight?  Believe, ye Pisos, the book will be perfectly like such a picture, the ideas of which, like a sick man’s dreams, are all vain and fictitious:  so that neither head nor foot can correspond to any one form.  “Poets and painters [you will say] have ever had equal authority for attempting any thing.”  We are conscious of this, and this privilege we demand and allow in turn:  but not to such a degree, that the tame should associate with the savage; nor that serpents should be coupled with birds, lambs with tigers.

In pompous introductions, and such as promise a great deal, it generally happens that one or two verses of purple patch-work, that may make a great show, are tagged on; as when the grove and the altar of Diana and the meandering of a current hastening through pleasant fields, or the river Rhine, or the rainbow is described.  But here there was no room for these [fine things]:  perhaps, too, you know how to draw a cypress:  but what is that to the purpose, if he, whe is painted for the given price, is [to be represented as] swimming hopeless out of a shipwreck?  A large vase at first was designed:  why, as the wheel revolves, turns out a little pitcher?  In a word, be your subject what it will, let it be merely simple and uniform.

The great majority of us poets, father, and youths worthy such a father, are misled by the appearance of right.  I labor to be concise, I become obscure:  nerves and spirit fail him, that aims at the easy:  one, that pretends to be sublime, proves bombastical:  he who is too cautious and fearful of the storm, crawls along the ground:  he who wants to vary his subject in a marvelous manner, paints the dolphin in the woods, the boar in the sea.  The avoiding of an error leads to a fault, if it lack skill.