Letters to Dead Authors

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. [14 - “They say he put aside from him the pure lips of his wife and his little children, like a man unfree, and with his brave face bowed earthward sternly he waited till with such counsel as never mortal gave he might strengthen the hearts of the Fathers, and through his mourning friends go forth, a hero, into exile. Yet well he knew what things were being prepared for him at the hands of the tormentors, who, none the less, put aside the kinsmen that barred his path and the people that would fain have delayed his return, passing through their midst as he might have done if, his retainers’ weary business ended and the suits adjudged, he were faring to his Venafran lands or to Dorian Tarentum.”]

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, [15 - “Thou, Phidyle, hast no need to besiege the gods with slaughter so great of sheep, thou who crownest thy tiny deities with myrtle rare and rosemary. If but the hand be clean that touches the altar, then richest sacrifice will not more appease the angered Penates than the duteous cake and salt that crackles in the blaze.”]

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!

notes

1

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.

2

Rape of the Lock.

3

In Mr. Hogarth’s Caricatura.

4

Elwin’s Pope, ii. 15.

5

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

6

The Greek ῥόμβος, mentioned by Lucian and Theocritus, was the magical weapon of the Australians – the turndun.

7

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.

8

“The Lesson of Jupiter.” – Nineteenth Century, October 1885.

9

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.

10

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.

11

Omar was contemporary with the battle of Hastings.

12

Per mandata Ducis, Rex hic, Heralde, quiescis,

Ut custos maneas littoris et pelagi.

13

“Me neither resolute Sparta nor the rich Larissæan plain so enraptures as the fane of echoing Albunea, the headlong Anio, the grove of Tibur, the orchards watered by the wandering rills.”