The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry of Horace Part 21

PAGE 17.

Say, you're first cousin to that goodly pair, Caelius and Birrius, and their foibles share.

Caelius and Birrius were a couple of robbers, a fact distinctly mentioned in the Latin, and, I hope, capable of being inferred from the context of the English.

PAGE 35.

After life's endless babble they sleep well.

I need hardly refer to the well-known line in Macbeth.

PAGE 44.

Ca.s.sius the rake, and Maenius the buffoon.

This is nearly identical with a line in Howes, of which it may very possibly be an unconscious remembrance. Here and in other places I have called Nomenta.n.u.s, metri gratia, by his family name Ca.s.sius, though it is nowhere, I believe, applied to him by Horace. Pantolabus is supposed to be the same as Maenius, whom Horace mentions elsewhere, and I have been only too glad to take the supposition for granted. Generally, where a Horatian personage is known to have had two names, I have used that one which the exigences of the verse recommended.

PAGE 61.

O heaven-abandoned wretch! is all this care.

O inconsistent wretch! is all this coil.

GIFFORD'S Juvenal, Sat. xiv.

PAGE 94.

And each man's lips are at his neighbour's ear.

Perhaps a recollection of Pope's line (Satires of Dr.

Donne), "When half his nose is in his prince's ear."

PAGE 98.

Of studying truths that rick and poor concern, Which young and old are lost unless they learn.

This may seem borrowed from Cowper's "Tirocinium,"

--truths on which depend our main concern, That 'tis our shame and misery not to learn; but I believe the resemblance to be purely accidental. It may serve however to show that the more serious pa.s.sages in Horace, as well as the lighter ones, are not unlike Cowper.

PAGE 103.

That makes Atrides and Achilles foes.

Almost verbatim from a line in Pope's "Odyssey," which is itself probably from one in Maynwaring's First Book of the "Iliad."

PAGE 110.

Not to admire, Numicius, is the best, The only way, to make and keep men blest.

Slightly altered from the later editions of Francis: Not to admire is of all means the best, The only means, to make and keep us blest.

Ten lines lower down I have a couplet nearly coincident with one in Howes, but not intentionally so.

PAGE 124.

But what are Rhodes and Lesbos, and the rest.

This and the nine following lines are a considerable expansion of the Latin: but I was apprehensive of not bringing out the connexion, if I translated more closely.

PAGE 126.

Empedocles or the Stertinian school.

As Horace has chosen to take Stertinius here as a type of the Stoics, I thought I might avail myself of a similar licence, and call the Stoics as a school by his name.

PAGE 129.

The ox, unyoked and resting from the plough, Wants fodder, stripped from elm or poplar bough.

Horace merely has "strictis frondibus:" but the writers De Re Rustica, quoted by the commentators, tell us what the leaves in use were.

PAGE 131.

When Maenius, after n.o.bly gobbling down His fortune, took to living on the town.

"Took to living on the town" is not meant as a version of "urba.n.u.s coepit haberi," but rather as an equivalent suggested by the context.

PAGE 134.

Each law, each right, each statute and each act.

Horace's object is evidently to give an exhaustive notion of the various parts of the law: and I have tried to produce the same impression by acc.u.mulating terms, without caring how far they can severally be discriminated.

PAGE 135.

I've shed no blood. You shall not feed the crow.

I'll have thee hanged to feed the crow.

SCOTT, Lay of the Last Minstrel.