Part 15

To them, to you, the loveliness of your land is, and was, a thing to live for. None of the Latin poets your fellows, or none but Virgil, seem to me to have known so well as you, Horace, how happy and fortunate a thing it was to be born in Italy. You do not say so, like your Virgil, in one splendid passage, numbering the glories of the land as a lover might count the perfections of his mistress. But the sentiment is ever in your heart and often on your lips.

Me nec tam patiens Lacedæmon, Nec tam Larissæ percussit campus opimæ, Quam domus Albuneæ resonantis Et præceps Anio, ac Tiburni lucus, et uda Mobilibus pomaria rivis. {229}

So a poet should speak, and to every singer his own land should be dearest. Beautiful is Italy with the grave and delicate outlines of her sacred hills, her dark groves, her little cities perched like eyries on the crags, her rivers gliding under ancient walls; beautiful is Italy, her seas, and her suns: but dearer to me the long grey wave that bites the rock below the minster in the north; dearer are the barren moor and black peat-water swirling in tauny foam, and the scent of bog myrtle and the bloom of heather, and, watching over the lochs, the green round-shouldered hills.

In affection for your native land, Horace, certainly the pride in great Romans dead and gone made part, and you were, in all senses, a lover of your country, your country’s heroes, your country’s gods. None but a patriot could have sung that ode on Regulus, who died, as our own hero died on an evil day, for the honour of Rome, as Gordon for the honour of England.

Fertur pudicæ conjugis osculum, Parvosque natos, ut capitis minor, Ab se removisse, et virilem Torvus humi posuisse voltum:

Donec labantes consilio patres Firmaret auctor nunquam alias dato, Interque mærentes amicos Egregius properaret exul.

Atqui sciebat, quæ sibi barbarus Tortor pararet: non aliter tamen Dimovit obstantes propinquos, Et populum reditus morantem,

Quam si clientum longa negotia Dijudicata lite relinqueret, Tendens Venafranos in agros Aut Lacedæmonium Tarentum. {231}

We talk of the Greeks as your teachers. Your teachers they were, but that poem could only have been written by a Roman! The strength, the tenderness, the noble and monumental resolution and resignation—these are the gifts of the lords of human things, the masters of the world.

Your country’s heroes are dear to you, Horace, but you did not sing them better than your country’s Gods, the pious protecting spirits of the hearth, the farm, the field; kindly ghosts, it may be, of Latin fathers dead or Gods framed in the image of these. What you actually believed we know not, you knew not. Who knows what he believes? Parcus Deorum cultor you bowed not often, it may be, in the temples of the state religion and before the statues of the great Olympians; but the pure and pious worship of rustic tradition, the faith handed down by the homely elders, with that you never broke. Clean hands and a pure heart, these, with a sacred cake and shining grains of salt, you could offer to the Lares. It was a benignant religion, uniting old times and new, men living and men long dead and gone, in a kind of service and sacrifice solemn yet familiar.

Te nihil attinet Tentare multa cæde bidentium Parvos coronantem marino Rore deos fragilique myrto.

Immunis aram si tetigit manus, Non sumptuosa blandior hostia Mellivit aversos Penates Farre pio et saliente mica, {233}

Farewell, dear Horace; farewell, thou wise and kindly heathen; of mortals the most human, the friend of my friends and of so many generations of men.

Ave atque Vale!

FOOTNOTES

{13} I am informed that the Natural History of Young Ladies is attributed, by some writers, to another philosopher, the author of The Art of Pluck.

{48a} Rape of the Lock.

{48b} In Mr. Hogarth’s Caricatura.

{49} Elwin’s Pope, ii. 15.

{50} “Poor Pope was always a hand-to-mouth liar.”—Pope, by Leslie Stephen, 139.

{64} The Greek ῥόμβος, mentioned by Lucian and Theocritus, was the magical weapon of the Australians—the turndun.

{160} Lord Napier and Ettrick points out to me that, unluckily, the tradition is erroneous. Piers was not executed at all. William Cockburn suffered in Edinburgh. But the Border Minstrelsy overrides history.

Criminal Trials in Scotland, by Robert Pitcairn, Esq. Vol. i. part i. p. 144, A.D. 1530. 17 Jac. V.

May 16. William Cokburne of Henderland, convicted (in presence of the King) of high treason committed by him in bringing Alexander Forestare and his son, Englishmen, to the plundering of Archibald Somervile; and for treasonably bringing certain Englishmen to the lands of Glenquhome; and for common theft, common reset of theft, out-putting and in-putting thereof. Sentence. For which causes and crimes he has forfeited his life, lands, and goods, movable and immovable; which shall be escheated to the King. Beheaded.

{169} “The Lesson of Jupiter.”—Nineteenth Century, October 1885.

{215} Mr. Swinburne’s and Mr. Arnold’s diverse views of Byron will be found in the Selections by Mr. Arnold and in the Nineteenth Century.

{216} The hills above San Remo, where rose-bushes are planted by the shrines. Omar desired that his grave might be where the wind would scatter rose-leaves over it.

{218} Omar was contemporary with the battle of Hastings.