The Press.
London, England, 1856-04-05 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

official notabilities. But whether he rebukes the vain, or
ministers comfort to wounded susceptibility, he knows the
art of sweetening his potions by his tone of good-humoured
levity and ban'.er. Angry passions, he suggests, have been
excited more than enough; it is time to allay irritation, to
relieve men of their fears, to surround the throne with
cheerful countenances ; to let all men know each other's
weaknesses, and rely upon mutual indulgence. The genial
magician who shall thus transform society must have
special qualifications for a task so delicate. He must be of
no family illustration himself, to make the new men jea-
lona ; he must be a man of courtly manners, to satisfy the
taste of the refined ; he must dress with faultless neatness
rather than elegance, trim his hair and beard caretully but
not fantastically, have a tender indulgence for the vices of
good company, and if his own stomach is too weak for an
occasional excess, he must sit through the festive meetings
of his companions, and enjoy at least their enjoyment. He
must be fund of music and poetry ; and if he is able to
entertain others with his wit, if, above all, he can strike
the lyre to notes of genial harmony himself, he will become
the soul of fellowship, the emperor's viceroy in the realms
of fashion. He must be able to invest ordinary ideas with
elegant language, and appeal to educated mediocrity by
sentiments level with its understanding ; and then, if he
can sometimes take a higher flight, and utter bursts of
inspiration, solemn, passionate, and tender, if he can
assume an enthusiasm worthy of a Roman freeman or a
Grecian bard, and emulate the fire of Pinder with the
steady glow of a sustained dignity, he will combine the
voices of the generous and the vulgar, of the future and of
the present, and become a fixed star in the heaven of
poetry.
A further task remains, however, for the favored instru-
ment of ministerial conservatism. Horace must teach the
Roman gentlemen to be religious, or at least to appear so.
Horace was himself, so he seems to confess, something of
a scapegrace in his youth : one who could be so wrong and
foolish as to embrace the cause of the murderers of divine
Julius, must have imbibed some very false notions from
the sources of his philosophy. He had dallied with the
Greek ideologists, the corrupters of youth, in the schools
of Athens ; he had fancied himself a disciple of Epicurus :
child as he was, he had affected to renounce allegiance to
all sound principles of religion as well as of politics.
Under the change of his fortunes he has had the grace to
repent; he has become devout; he wishes his countrymen
to know how highly he now thinks of Jupiter and Apollo,
no less than of Augustus and Maecenas. A man of ardent
imagination and of delicate sensibility, a man who ques-
tioned the world and his own conscience both solemnly
and sternly—such a man as Virgil, for instance—might
well persuade himself that the miseries he had witnessed
attested the mortal sin of renouncing the worship of the
gods, and compassing the destruction of their hero ; but
Horace has no such claim on our indulgent interpretation,
and the palinodes of his lyric muse ring false to an atten•
tive ear.

Every despot likes to make a Capua for his
people ; but every despot is not so fortunate in
his instruments as Augustus.

Like Niebuhr, Mr...Merivale does not, we
think, do full justice to Propertius, though
decidedly more favorable to him than the
German critic. Neither Ovid nor Tibullus
has written anything equal to the well-
known eleventh elegy of the fourth book; and
there are several others, such as the fifth and
twelfth of the third book, and eleventh of the
first, which are not surpassed by any composi-
tion of his contemporaries. He is equal to
Ovid in point and to Tibullus in tenderness.
Tibullus is described by Mr. Merivale very
fairly. He does not, however, mention what
is so pleasant to the student of that poet—
namely, those occasional chivalric sentiments
which are found in Tibullus alone of all the
ancient writers. We think he slightly over-
rates Ovid—" The ' Loves of the Heroines' is
" the most elevated and refined in sentiment
" of all elegiac compositions of the Romans."
This, in our opinion, is about as true as if he
should say that the epistle from Eloise to
Abelard was the most elevated and refined in
sentiment of all the elegiac compositions of
the English. It is difficult to name any
epistle of Ovid which is more free from gross
images and gross suggestions than the famous
elegy of Pope. In all that Mr. Merivale says
on the character of Virgil we fully concur. Ile
concludes his sketch of him with a quotation
from a Vitgilian enthusiast, " that if Homer
" really made Virgil, it was undoubtedly his
" greatest work."