(5) All But:  A Chronicle of Laxenford Life.  By Pen Oliver, F.R.C.S.  (Kegan Paul.)

A LITERARY PILGRIM

(Pall Mall Gazette, April 17, 1886.)

Antiquarian books, as a rule, are extremely dull reading.  They give us facts without form, science without style, and learning without life.  An exception, however, must be made for M. Gaston Boissier’s Promenades Archeologiques.  M. Boissier is a most pleasant and picturesque writer, and is really able to give his readers useful information without ever boring them, an accomplishment which is entirely unknown in Germany, and in England is extremely rare.

The first essay in his book is on the probable site of Horace’s country-house, a subject that has interested many scholars from the Renaissance down to our own day.  M. Boissier, following the investigations of Signor Rosa, places it on a little hill over-looking the Licenza, and his theory has a great deal to recommend it.  The plough still turns up on the spot the bricks and tiles of an old Roman villa; a spring of clear water, like that of which the poet so often sang, ’breaks babbling from the hollow rock,’ and is still called by the peasants Fonte dell’ Oratini, some faint echo possibly of the singer’s name; the view from the hill is just what is described in the epistles, ’Continui montes nisi dissocientur opaca valle’; hard by is the site of the ruined temple of Vacuna, where Horace tells us he wrote one of his poems, and the local rustics still go to Varia (Vicovaro) on market days as they used to do when the graceful Roman lyrist sauntered through his vines and played at being a country gentleman.

M. Boissier, however, is not content merely with identifying the poet’s house; he also warmly defends him from the charge that has been brought against him of servility in accepting it.  He points out that it was only after the invention of printing that literature became a money-making profession, and that, as there was no copyright law at Rome to prevent books being pirated, patrons had to take the place that publishers hold, or should hold, nowadays.  The Roman patron, in fact, kept the Roman poet alive, and we fancy that many of our modern bards rather regret the old system.  Better, surely, the humiliation of the sportula than the indignity of a bill for printing!  Better to accept a country-house as a gift than to be in debt to one’s landlady!  On the whole, the patron was an excellent institution, if not for poetry at least for the poets; and though he had to be propitiated by panegyrics, still are we not told by our most shining lights that the subject is of no importance in a work of art?  M. Boissier need not apologise for Horace:  every poet longs for a Maecenas.