The Sun.
London, England, 1869-10-26 00:00:00

ME SUN, LONDON, TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 26, 1869.

LITERATURE.

Lord Lytton's Horace.

The Odes and Epodes of Horace. A Metrical Trans-
lation into English, with Introduction and Com-
mentaries. By Lord Lytton. With Latin Text.
One Vol., pp. 485. Win. Blackwood and Sons
The reputation of Horace is, iu many ways, very
exceptional. As an author he has left to posterity
more than merely his name and his writings. Ile
has bequeathed to all after times his individuality.
Although nearly two thousand years have now
elapsed since the period in which he flourished.
those who love his effusions the most, seem, in spite
of the lapse of those intervening twenty centuries,
to know all about the man himself personally—
and not simply to know him, but to know him
intimately. Sixty-five years before the coming of
Our Lord, on the Bth of December (us c. 689),
Horace was born, on his father's estate, at Venusia.
Eight years before the commencement of the Chris-
tian Era, on the 27th of November (u. c. 746), he
had expired. his whole career was, consequently,
comprised within an interval of fifty-seven years
altogether. His birth occurred within the year made
memorable by the first engendering of Cataline's
Conspiracy. When Horace was yet but one year
old, Cneius Pompey had erected Syria into a Roman
province. When the future lyrist, who was destined
to become the friend of Augustus awl one of the
chief among the peaceful glories of his reign, was
but a prattling child of two, Pompey had captured
the city of Jerusalem and the loag germinating
plot contrived by the lawless patrician, alienum ap-
petens, sui profusus, was effectually denounced by
the oratorical genius of Cicero and completely crushed
out by his consular authority. When Horace was
five, came the epoch of the first great trium-
virate—Caesar with Pompey and Crassus, holding
the vast dominions of Rome under their joint sub-
jection. Horace was a boy of ten when Julius
Caesar at the head of his troops first landed
upon the shores of Britain. lie was twelve
when his six years of education in Rome com-
menced. In his seventeenth year he assumed
the toga virilis. Shortly after the attainment of
his eighteenth year be went to Athens for the ad-
vaucenitnt of his studies iu that highest school of
Pagan learning. It was while Horace was yet
nineteen that Cato committed suicide at Utica by
falling upon his sword, with Plato's dialogue on the
immortality of the soul, the imperishable Pi wit), ly-
ing open before him. Horace was yet but nineteen
when Julius Car assumed the Dictatorship. Ile
was twenty, consequently, when, in the following
spring, Caesar fell under the daggers of Brutus
and his accomplices. Horace was two-and-twenty
at the date of the inauguration of the second Trium-
virate, when Octavius, and Anthony, and Lepidus
shared the world between them, after the manner of
the first Triumvirs. Then, also, at the age of t w enty -
two, Horace, still being at Athens, joined the army
of Brutus in the capacity of Military Tribune. It
was in that character that he had to succumb, with
the rest, upon the defeat of the forces of Brutus and
Cassius by the soldiers of the Triumvirs in the
great pitched battle of Philippi. There it was that
the young poet of the hereafter dropped his shield
at the close of the carnage, as he himself has bad the
courage to relate in one of his odes, flying from the
field, in the midst of the general panic—but, as
Lord Lytton with generous indignation maintains,
and with full reason, not ingloriously. Lepidus
having been excluded from the Triumvirate in the
year B.C. 36, and Anthony five
years afterwards
having been defeated in the
great sea fight at
Actium, Octavius—becoming thereby the sole
and sovereign master of Rowe and all the pro-
vinces, thirty years before the advent of our
Redeemer—between two and three years later
on, inaugurated the Empire of Pagan Rome
(in other words of the whole of the then
known world) by assuming to himself the
title of Caesar Augustus. Then it was that for
somewhere about twenty years Horace enjoyed the
intimate personal friendship of the reigning Empe-
ror, together with that also of the principal per-
sonages of the imperial court—including among
these such men as the heroic Asinius Pollio, or as
the refined and munificeut Caius Mecamas, or as
that five years' senior of Horace, the silver. styled
Publius Virgil, who, according to Lis own sententi-
ous epitaph, selected as his triple; theme, Pascua,
rura, duces—in allusion to the el'aseid, the Georgics,
and the Eclogues. It is curiously noticeable, in re-
gard to Horace and Augustus, that the Emperor
reigned exactly as many years as the Puet lived.
Fifty-seven years had elapsed from the date of his
accession to the throne of the Cmears, when Augus-
tus breathed his last, on the 19th of August, A.D.
14—Our Lord at that time leading His mystical hid-
den life at Nazareth. When Augustus died, how-
ever, the great lyrical poet, Horace, and with him
his munificent patron and friend, Mecamas, had
been
r a v e s t
—w h
er and
m w tee,nt years reposing in their
g securelyy established, thanks
tofame,
a
to the muse of Horace, and inextricably inter-
woven. Nineteen centuries have by this present
time elapsed since Quintus Horatius Flaccus
began the composition of his immortal Odes. For
nearly thirty years he enjoyed the conscious-
ness of his own rare gifts, and of his indestruc-
tible reputation. Ever since then his fame as a
lyrical poet has spread in proportion to the intel-
lectual cultivation of succeeding generations. He
has been translated into every living language
possessing a literature of its own of anything
like importance. His works have been reprinted
in ceuutlees editions : this remark having relation
of course to their reduplication, since the contriv-
ance of the printing machine. Previously they
had been multiplied and tenderly preserved in innu-
merable manuscripts. Book by book, ode by ode,
liueby line, almost letter by letter, they have been at
uncertain but very frequent intervals annotated,
and scrutinized, and sifted, and weighed in the
balance, by an astounding succession of shrewd
and scholarly commentators. Passed, as it were,
through that tieryfurnace of criticism, examined thus
searchingly, so to speak, under the lens of a miscro-
scope, tried by every conceivable test at the
command of the experts in literary analysis, the
material of Horace, so to speak, has proved
to be nothing less —one may assert it—than
thrice-refined gold throughout. His especially
is the "curious felicity" of written language.
His is that charm which masters the widest and
the most diversified admiration. Men- of -the-
world and men-of-letters alike come eagerly to
drink in the wit and the wisdom, the delicate
grace, and the incisive irony, the genial humanity
and the tranquillizing philosophy, squandered so
affluently over these pages of his, in which the
resignation of the Stoic is no less perpetually appa-
rent than the sensuous ease of the Epicurean.
Statesman and schoolboy, scholar and worldling,
the recluse supporting life upon lentils and the
voluptuary lapped in all the luxuries of civilization,
each and all of them find in Horace an ever new
and an inexhaustible fascinaSion. His annotators
alone have produced a library. His translators
are legion. Scarcely is there a lettered man, as
Lord Lytton has himself remarked, but has, at some
time, tried his skillin turning one or two at least
of these incomparable odes of the great Roman
lyrist into his own (meaning, of course, into the
translator's own) vernacular. Within the range
of our own immediate recollection, there are three
English Editors of Horace, and there are three
English Translators of his Odes, whose labours (of
love) may take rank with the most renowned among
all their predecessors--nay, whose achievements we
do not hesitate to affirm, surpass in all the highest
essentials those of the most gifted and of the most
successful among the whole concourse of those pre-
decessors. The three editors, annotators, commen-
tators, elucidators, call them how you please, of
the inner beauties and of the subtler significance
of Horace, are, it is scarcely necessary to add, Mr.
Morro, and Mr.Yonge, and the late gifted Dean of
St. Paul's Cathedral. '1 he three translators of
Horace into English verse, the three scholarly
Horatian poets -who have produced these latest,
and, as wo believe them to be, also, most felici-
tous beyond any comparison, among all the trans-
lations from Horace that have ever been contributed
to what we may call our exotic literature, are,
I though it is almost needless to specify their names,