_Circum
praecordia ludit_, "he plays about the heartstrings," said Persius, long
before any of these, when the actual Horace was still fresh in the
memory of men.
If we were to take detailed account of certain qualities missed in
Horace by the modern reader, we should be even more deeply convinced of
his power of personal attraction. He is not a Christian poet, but a
pagan. Faith in immortality and Providence, penitence and penance, and
humanitarian sentiment, are hardly to be found in his pages. He is
sometimes too unrestrained in expression. The unsympathetic or
unintelligent critic might charge him with being commonplace.
Yet these defects are more apparent than real, and have never been an
obstacle to souls attracted by Horace. His pages are charged with
sympathy for men. His lapses in taste are not numerous, and are, after
all, less offensive than those of European letters today, after the
coming of sin with the law. And he is not commonplace, but universal.
His content is familiar matter of today as well as of his own time. His
delightful natural settings are never novel, romantic, or forced; we
have seen them all, in experience or in literature, again and again, and
they make familiar and intimate appeal.
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