leafy Tarentum, or snowy Algidus, or green Venafrum.  The clear-cut elegance of his miniatures of Italian scenery is not due to their individual interest, but to their connection with the universal life of man.  Description for its own sake is hardly to be found in Horace.  In the same way, the vivid glimpses he affords of his own life, person, and character almost never prompt the thought of egotism.  The most personal of poets, his expression of self nowhere becomes selfish expression.

But there are spectators who are mere spectators.  Horace is more; he is a critic and an interpreter.  He looks forth upon life with a keen vision for comparative values, and gives sane and distinct expression to what he sees.

Horace must not be thought of, however, as a censorious or carping critic.  His attitude is judicial, and the verdict is seldom other than lenient and kindly.  He is not a wasp of Twickenham, not a Juvenal furiously laying about him with a heavy lash, not a Lucilius with the axes of Scipionic patrons to grind, having at the leaders of the people and the people themselves.  He is in as little degree an Ennius, composing merely to gratify the taste for entertainment.  There are some, as a matter of fact, to whom in satire he seems to go beyond the limit of good-nature.  At vice in pronounced form, at all forms of unmanliness, he does indeed strike out, like Lucilius the knight of Campania, his predecessor and pattern, gracious only to virtue and to the friends of virtue; but those whose hands are clean and whose hearts are pure need fear nothing.  Even those who are guilty of the ordinary frailties of human kind need fear nothing worse than being good-humoredly laughed at.  The objects of Horace’s smiling condemnation are not the trifling faults of the individual or the class, but the universal grosser stupidities which poison the sources of life.

The Horace of the Satires and Epistles is better called an essayist.  That he is a satirist at all is less by virtue of intention than because of the mere fact that he is a spectator.  To look upon life with the eye of understanding is to see men the prey to passions and delusions,—­the very comment on which can be nothing else than satire.

And now, what is it that Horace sees as he sits in philosophic detachment on the serene heights of contemplation; and what are his reflections?

The great factor in the character of Horace is his philosophy of life.  To define it is to give the meaning of the word Horatian as far as content is concerned, and to trace the thread which more than any other makes his works a unity.

i.  THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES