faults were just such as would meet the approbation of Maecenas, on whose
favour Horace was at the time almost wholly dependent; and Horace may
himself have been glad to get rid, as it were, of his own bad immature
work by committing it to publicity. The celebrated passage in Keats'
preface to _Endymion,_ where he gives his reasons for publishing a poem
of whose weakness and faultiness he was himself acutely conscious, is of
very wide application; and it is easy to believe that, after the
publication of the _Epodes,_ Horace could turn with an easier and less
embarrassed mind to the composition of the _Odes_.

Meanwhile he was content to be known as a writer of satire, one whose
wish it was to bring up to an Augustan polish the literary form already
carried to a high degree of success by Lucilius. The second book of
_Satires_ was published not long after the _Epodes_. It shows in every
way an enormous advance over the first. He has shaken himself free from
the imitation of Lucilius, which alternates in the earliest satires with
a rather bitter and self-conscious depreciation of the work of the older
poet and his successors. The prosperous turn Horace's own life had taken
was ripening him fast, and undoing the bad effects of earlier years. We
have passed for good out of the society of Rupilius Rex and Canidia. At
one time Horace must have run the risk of turning out a sort of
ineffectual Francois Villon; this, too, is over, and his earlier
education bears fruit in a temper of remarkable and delicate gifts.

This second book of _Satires_ marks in one way the culmination of
Horace's powers. The brilliance of the first years of the Empire
stimulated the social aptitude and dramatic perception of a poet who
lived in the heart of Rome, already free from fear or ambition, but as
yet untouched by the melancholy temper which grew on him in later years.
He employs the semi-dramatic form of easy dialogue throughout the book