age--_adolescentiam agunt, senectutem oblectant,_ may be said of them
with as much truth as ever now. Yet no analysis will explain their
indefinable charm. If the so-called "lyrical cry" be of the essence of a
true lyric, they are not true lyrics at all. Few of them are free from a
marked artificiality, an almost rigid adherence to canon. Their range of
thought is not great; their range of feeling is studiously narrow. Beside
the air and fire of a lyric of Catullus, an ode of Horace for the moment
grows pale and heavy, _cineris specie decoloratur_. Beside one of the
pathetic half-lines of Virgil, with their broken gleams and murmurs as of
another world, a Horatian phrase loses lustre and sound. Yet Horace
appeals to a tenfold larger audience than Catullus--to a larger audience,
it may even be said, than Virgil. Nor is he a poets' poet: the refined
and exquisite technique of the _Odes_ may be only appreciable by a
trained artist in language; but it is the untrained mind, on whom other
art falls flat, that the art of Horace, by some unique penetrative power,
kindles and quickens. His own phrase of "golden mediocrity" expresses
with some truth the paradox of his poetry; in no other poet, ancient or
modern, has such studied and unintermitted mediocrity been wrought in
pure gold. By some tact or instinct--the "felicity," which is half of the
famous phrase in which he is characterised by Petronius--he realised
that, limited as his own range of emotion was, that of mankind at large
was still more so, and that the cardinal matter was to strike in the
centre. Wherever he finds himself on the edge of the range in which his
touch is certain, he draws back with a smile; and so his concentrated
effect, within his limited but central field, is unsurpassed, and perhaps
unequalled.

This may partly explain how it was that with Horace the Latin lyric stops
dead. His success was so immediate and so immense that it fixed the
limit, so to speak, for future poets within the confined range which he