with extraordinary lightness and skill. The familiar hexameter, which
Lucilius had left still cumbrous and verbose, is like wax in his hands;
his perfection in this use of the metre is as complete as that of Virgil
in the stately and serious manner. And behind this accomplished literary
method lies an unequalled perception of common human nature, a rich vein
of serious and quiet humour, and a power of language the more remarkable
that it is so unassuming, and always seems as it were to say the right
thing by accident. With the free growth of his natural humour he has
attained a power of self-appreciation which is unerring. The _Satires_
are full from end to end of himself and his own affairs; but the name of
egoism cannot be applied to any self-revelation or self-criticism which
is so just and so certain. From the opening lines of the first satire,
where he notes the faults of his own earlier work, to the last line of
the book, with its Parthian shot at Canidia and the _jeunesse orageuse_
that he had so long left behind, there is not a page which is not full of
that self-reference which, in its truth and tact, constantly passes
beyond itself and holds up the mirror to universal human nature. In
reading the _Satires_ we all read our own minds and hearts.

Nearly ten years elapsed between the publication of the second book of
the _Satires_ and that of the first book of the _Epistles_. Horace had
passed meanwhile into later middle life. He had in great measure retired
from society, and lived more and more in the quietness of his little
estate among the Sabine hills. Life was still full of vivid interest; but
books were more than ever a second world to him, and, like Virgil, he was
returning with a perpetually increasing absorption to the Greek
philosophies, which had been the earliest passion of his youth. Years had
brought the philosophic mind; the more so that these years had been
filled with the labour of the _Odes,_ a work of the highest and most
intricate effort, and involving the constant study of the masterpieces of