Cease, my mate, from slumber now;
Let the sacred hymn-notes flow,
Wailing with thy voice divine,
Long-wept Itys, mine and thine.
So, when thy brown beak is thrilling
With that holy music-trilling,

Through the woodbine's leafy bound
Swells the pure melodious sound
To the throne of Zeus; and there
Phoebus of the golden hair
Hearing, to thine elegies
With awakened chords replies
On his ivory-clasped lyre,
Stirring all the Olympian quire;
Till from each immortal tongue
Of that blessed heavenly throng
Peals the full harmonious song.

What the Augustan poets learned from the Greeks, then, was so much of literary art as can be taught as can be taught to an alien race, endowed by nature with gifts at once greater than and inferior to those of their teachers. The virile force which conquered the world they could learn to subdue in expression, to manipulate as the energies of steam are manipulated through the complexities of cunning machinery, to expend upon the carving of the cherry-stones of verse, or even upon the construction and elaboration of an epic like the Æneid. Horace is the schoolmaster of this doctrine, and there can be no question that, in assuming this function, he rendered an essential service to his people, and to the races whom they, in their turn, were to instruct in civility. The elements of poetic criticism, the higher mechanics of verse, the necessity of unity, of proportion, of fidelity to the obvious and unmistakable traits of nature meaning by that human nature - this is the substance of Horace's teaching. The Latin formulas of artistic verse-making were, if not fully wrought out, at least sketched or suggested

in this somewhat rambling epistle which, from the time of Quintilian, some three-quarters of a century later, has borne the title of the Art of Poetry.

Horace's little treatise is full of 'winged words.' Many phrases and single lines, illustrating his 'callida junctura,' or remarkable as the adequate and almost inevitable expression of an enduring thought, linger in the memory. Who does not know these proverbial catchwords, such as 'purpureus pannus,' 'jus et norma loquendi,' 'decies repetita placebit'? They are as nails fastened by a master of assemblies, meant to stay where they were fixed, and fulfilling in this sense the purpose of their author.

The Revival of Learning is often thought of as a return to the Greek. Yet it was, in its main current and tendency, rather a renewal of interest in the Latin as literature. Upon this point the testimony of Mark Pattison ('Isaac Casaubon,' pp. 507, 510, 523) will be regarded as weighty: "In the fifteenth century, 'educated Europe' is but a synonym for Italy. What literature there was outside the Alps was a derivative from, or dependent of, the Italian movement. The fact that the movement originated in the Latin peninsula was decisive of the character of the first age of classical learning (1400-1550). It was a revival of Latin, as opposed to Greek literature. It is now well understood that the fall of Constantinople, though an influential incident of the movement, ranks for nothing among the causes of the Renaissance. What was revived in Italy of the fifteenth century was the taste of the schools of the early Empire-of the second and third century. . . . As Italy had been the home of classical taste in the first period, France became the home of classical learning in the second. . . . It needed two centuries more of spec...lative effort in Europe, before philologians could go back to Greek philosophy with the key of it in their hands. It is only indeed within the present century that learning has grown strong enough to cope with the exposi

tion of Aristotle, and an edition of the Aristotelic encyclopædia is still a vision of the future.”

By the middle of the sixteenth century the French were imitating the Art of Poetry, and more than a quarter of a century earlier Vida was adapting Quintilian and extracting rules from the practice of Virgil, that Italy might not go astray in the composition of its epics, whether Latin or Italian. Aristotle was not wholly ignored, but neither was he well understood by those whom the nations recognized as the supreme arbiters of taste. The Augustan' ages of Italy, France, and, we may add, England, were Roman in sentiment and aspiration. Exceptions seem only to prove the rule. Ronsard imitated Pindar and Anacreon, but Malherbe quickly blighted his fame, and restrained the too impetuous soarings of the Gallic Muse. Not till the French Romantic school of the first half of our century threw off the shackles of the Latin tradition was Ronsard rehabilitated in public esteem. Shakespeare, at his best a Greek in limpidity and pregnancy of utterance, was too bold and irregular for Pope and Addison. The Greek genius had breathed, like Spring, for a few lovely days over Western Europe, and the thickets were becoming alive with jubilant voices, when all too quickly matron Summer, in the person of the world-weary literature of the Empire, swept majestically up, struck drought to the heart of the year, hushed the wild warblings, and diffused a uniform soberness and sereness over meadow and woodland. Pegasus was put into harness, and set to drawing vulgar loads. In simple prose, poetry was forced to become pedestrian, regular, methodical.

It would be an error to regard this restraint and sobriety as an unmixed evil. The northern nations had become habituated to the sway of Roman Christianity, and were not yet prepared for the more primitive and elementary forms of their faith. No more, when just emergent from the Middle Ages and the medieval conceptions of literature, were they fully ripe for the

appropriation of the purer Greek beauty. Their sublimity was but too apt to become rhapsody, their wit to become conceit, and their simplicity a merely puerile naïveté. The Roman discipline was a schoolmaster to bring them to Hellenic freedom and fulness. Thus considered, we see its significance and utility, and can only be thankful that it was, and was vigorously exercised.

But these treatises are more than historic documents, testifying to a state of things which has passed away. In that aspect they are indispensable, as disclosing the principles which, with varying authority in different countries, have held sway from Tasso to Leopardi, from Malherbe to Victor Hugo, and, happily for us - if we except sporadic phenomena, like Ben Jonson in the early seventeenth century-from Pope only to Burns. They are more than historic documents, because successive periods of literature overlap one another, and a poet of Horatian moods may occasionally be caught singing in the nineteenth century, nay - who knows? perhaps even in America. They are more, because some part of their spirit and meaning is Greek, and therefore less transitory and provisional than that which boasts the eternity of Rome. Finally, they are more, because some part of their content is perennially true, irrespective of its local or temporal origin, because their form is imperishable, and therefore because men will continue to peruse and discuss them so long as poetry is honored.