With characteristic irony Horace puts his fancies into the mouth of
Alphius, a miserly money-lender. No one yearns so keenly for the
country and its imagined peace as the overworked city man, when his
pulse is low and his spirits weary with bad air and the reaction of
over-excitement; no one, as a rule, is more apt to tire of the homely
and uneventful life which the country offers, or to find that, for him
at least, its quietude does not bring peace. It is not, therefore, at
all out of keeping, although critics have taken exception to the poem
on this ground, that Horace makes Alphius rhapsodise on the charms of
a rural life, and having tried them, creep back within the year to his
moneybags and his ten per cent. It was, besides, a favourite doctrine
with him, which he is constantly enforcing in his later works, that
everybody envies his neighbour's pursuits--until he tries them.

ALPHIUS.

Happy the man, in busy schemes unskilled,
Who, living simply, like our sires of old,
Tills the few acres, which his father tilled,
Vexed by no thoughts of usury or gold;

The shrilling clarion ne'er his slumber mars,
Nor quails he at the howl of angry seas;
He shuns the forum, with its wordy jars,
Nor at a great man's door consents to freeze.

The tender vine-shoots, budding into life,
He with the stately poplar-tree doth wed,
Lopping the fruitless branches with his knife,