composing merely to gratify the taste for entertainment. There are some,
as a matter of fact, to whom in satire he seems to go beyond the limit
of good-nature. At vice in pronounced form, at all forms of unmanliness,
he does indeed strike out, like Lucilius the knight of Campania, his
predecessor and pattern, gracious only to virtue and to the friends of
virtue; but those whose hands are clean and whose hearts are pure need
fear nothing. Even those who are guilty of the ordinary frailties of
human kind need fear nothing worse than being good-humoredly laughed at.
The objects of Horace's smiling condemnation are not the trifling faults
of the individual or the class, but the universal grosser stupidities
which poison the sources of life.

The Horace of the _Satires_ and _Epistles_ is better called an essayist.
That he is a satirist at all is less by virtue of intention than because
of the mere fact that he is a spectator. To look upon life with the eye
of understanding is to see men the prey to passions and delusions,--the
very comment on which can be nothing else than satire.

And now, what is it that Horace sees as he sits in philosophic
detachment on the serene heights of contemplation; and what are his
reflections?

The great factor in the character of Horace is his philosophy of life.
To define it is to give the meaning of the word Horatian as far as
content is concerned, and to trace the thread which more than any other
makes his works a unity.


_i_. THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES