and literary fame, and was giving himself up to the pursuit of wisdom.
The melancholy of temperament and advancing age is subtly interwoven in
his final words with the urbane humour and strong sense that had been his
companions through life:--

_Lusisti satis, edisti satis atque bibisti,
Tempus abire tibi est, ne potum largius acquo
Rideat et pulset lasciva decentius aetas._

A new generation, clever, audacious, and corrupt, had silently been
growing up under the Empire. Ovid was thirty, and had published his
_Amores_. The death of Virgil had left the field of serious poetry to
little men. The younger race had learned only too well the lesson of
minute care and formal polish so elaborately taught them by the earlier
Augustan poets, and had caught the ear of the town with work of
superficial but, for the time, captivating brilliance. Gloom was already
beginning to gather round the Imperial household; the influence of
Maecenas, the great support of letters for the last twenty years, was
fast on the wane. In the words just quoted, with their half-sad and half-
mocking echo of the famous passage of Lucretius,[8] Horace bids farewell
to poetry.

But literary criticism, in which he had so fine a taste, and on which he
was a recognised authority, continued to interest him; and the more
seriously minded of the younger poets turned to him for advice, which he
was always willing to give. The _Epistle to the Pisos,_ known more
generally under the name of the _Art of Poetry,_ seems to have been
composed at intervals during these later years, and was, perhaps, not
published till after his death in the year 8 B.C. It is a discussion of
dramatic poetry, largely based on Greek textbooks, but full of Horace's