We have seen that he never was really forgotten, and that there
never was a time of long duration when he ceased to be of real
importance to some portion of mankind.
The recital of historical fact is at best a narration of circumstance to
which there clings little of the warmth of life. An historical event
itself is but the cumulated and often frigid result of intimate original
forces that may have meant long travail of body and soul before the act
of realization became possible. The record of the event in chronicle or
its commemoration in monument is only the sign that at some time there
occurred a significant moment rendered inevitable by previous stirrings
of life whose intensity, if not whose very identity, are forgotten or no
longer realized.
Thus the enumeration of manuscript revisions, translations, imitations,
and scholastic editions of Horace may also seem at first sight the
narrative of cold detail. There may be readers who, remembering the
scant stream of the cultivated few who tided the poet through the
centuries of darkness, and the comparative rareness of cultivated men at
all times, will be slow to be convinced of any real impress of Horace
upon the life of men.
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