for passion frightens you, and ’t is pleasure more than love that you commend to the young.  Lydia and Glycera, and the others, are but passing guests of a heart at ease in itself, and happy enough when their facile reign is ended.  You seem to me like a man who welcomes middle age, and is more glad than Sophocles was to ‘flee from these hard masters’ the passions.  In the ’fallow leisure of life’ you glance round contented, and find all very good save the need to leave all behind.  Even that you take with an Italian good-humour, as the folk of your sunny country bear poverty and hunger.

    Durum, sed levius fit patientia!

To them, to you, the loveliness of your land is, and was, a thing to live for.  None of the Latin poets your fellows, or none but Virgil, seem to me to have 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)