VII - HORACE

Summary

LIFE AND POEMS.

(PUBLIC LECTURE, October Term, 1883.)

‘Place Milton's sonnets in relation to the circumstance on which each piece turns, and we begin to feel the superiority for poetic effect of real emotion over emotion meditated and revived. History has in it that which can touch us more abidingly than any fiction.’

–Pattison, Milton pp. 169–170.

To attempt to say anything new about Horace may seem absurd. But it is a characteristic of philological and historical study that the same subject admits of being viewed from different points, and this is peculiarly true in the case of a great poet. As there is no one way of rendering Shakspeare or Beethoven, so there is no final interpretation of a great literary work. What I wish now to attempt is to present the life and writings of Horace in their historical setting; in other words, to show both what was the attitude of the poet towards the world in which he lived, and how his own studies tended to produce the form of poetry which has made him a classic. I shall hope to show that it was because of the greatness in him that he rose to his lofty eminence; that it was because his sympathies followed the fortunes of his country that his best poetry has the stamp of moral greatness; that it was because his eye was fixed on great models, because he chose to dwell in mind and imagination with great men, that his writings attained their immortal perfection of form.