had chosen to adopt; and that range he had filled so perfectly that no
room was left for anything but imitation on the one hand, or, on the
other, such a painful avoidance of imitation as would be equally
disastrous in its results. With the principal lyric metres, too, the
sapphic and alcaic, he had done what Virgil had done with the dactylic
hexameter, carried them to the highest point of which the foreign Latin
tongue was capable. They were naturalised, but remained sterile. When at
last Latin lyric poetry took a new development, it was by starting afresh
from a wholly different point, and by a reversion to types which, for the
culture of the early imperial age, were obsolete and almost non-existent.

The phrase, _verbis felicissime audax,_ used of Horace as a lyric poet by
Quintilian, expresses, with something less than that fine critic's usual
accuracy, another quality which goes far to make the merit of the _Odes_.
Horace's use of words is, indeed, remarkably dexterous; but less so from
happy daring than from the tact which perpetually poises and balances
words, and counts no pains lost to find the word that is exactly right.
His audacities--if one cares to call them so--in the use of epithet, in
Greek constructions (which he uses rather more freely than any other
Latin poet), and in allusive turns of phrase, are all carefully
calculated and precisely measured. His unique power of compression is not
that of the poet who suddenly flashes out in a golden phrase, but more
akin to the art of the distiller who imprisons an essence, or the gem-
engraver working by minute touches on a fragment of translucent stone.
With very great resources of language at his disposal, he uses them with
singular and scrupulous frugality; in his measured epithets, his curious
fondness for a number of very simple and abstract words, and the studious
simplicity of effect in his most elaborately designed lyrics, he reminds
one of the method of Greek has-reliefs, or, still more (after allowing
for all the difference made by religious feeling), of the sculptured work