HORACE ODES BOOK e "NE.* HORACE is the only classical

author who has become thoroughly domesticated in England. He is the most companionable and the most quotable of poets, and he is himself so normal and natural a person that all his genius cannot frighten ue. Our satirists have imitated him, our judges have misquoted him, our Prime Ministers (till recently) have studied him and blessed him—and did we not ourselves all study him and curse him in the " Remove " at school ? Yet, known and loved as he has always been in England, he has had to wait till these last few weeks for an English edition of his great Fifth Book. HOW many of us till now had read a single line of it ? The neglect of these fifteen delightful Odes must remain among the user. plaincd perversities of scholarship, but our children will at any rate acknowledge gratefully that when the edition came it was complete and admirable.

In his learned but lucid Latin preface Mr. Godley tells the story of the manuscripts in which these precious poems—tko very crown and faefigium of Horace's poetic achievement" have so long "lain bid" in our libraries. The best of the MSS.

• Q. Hemet Reed Caminito; Librum Quit:rum. A Rudyardo ipase et CS Craves angles) redditum edidlt Aluredua D. Godley. Oxford : 1.313, ed. net.] (long known to scholars as "P ") is preserved, he says, " in Baclensi Groaspaniandrumpinacotheca," another is at Cambridge, and a third is in the private collection of the Poshworths of Market Poshworth. This last, which is happily not of first-rate importance, is so jealously guarded by its owner that Mr. Godley bed to content himself with a copy made by a neighbouring clergyman, who is described in the preface as " Wearies (le Boosting Perm," and also as one who does more honour to little Boosting by his devotion than by his Latinity. In spite of difficulties, however, an excellent text has been arrived at by the exertions of Mr. Godley himself and of his three assistants, Mr. Powell, Mr. Knox, and Mr. Ramsay, without whose unweary- ing labours the poems would never, says the editor, have taken the form in which they now appear.. In the concise but sufficient "critical notes" the most important variations and emenda- tions are clearly indicated, and it is quite refreshing to see recurring in this new field all the familiar phenomena of old- fashioned Textual Criticism. Bentley, Orelli, and the ubiquitous Pifl contribute suggestions which one could almost have foreseen from their names and a knowledge of their work, and the errors of the different copyists show all the usual idiosyncrasies, There is one scribe who never can get his lines to scan properly. and another who invents the oddest and most impossible words when he ventures on corrections of his own—he writes strap. has gin, for instance, in VU. 11 for slat Fannie, and he has talsakatibuo in the passage on popular music in XIV.

One of the chief curiosities of the Fifth Book must, of course, always be the little set of alternative versions which the poet made of several of the Odes. It is characteristic of his laborious method that he should have written more than one draft of each composition, but it can only be a happy chance that has rescued these few of the rejected alternatives from his waste- paper-basket. It is a chance for which we may well be grateful, for some of the brouillons seem of equal merit with the final copies, and the Alcaie form of Ode I. is sometimes thought leas remarkable than the cunning Sapphics which arc here printed (with the other "alternatives ") in the appendix. All the surviving versions are, however, as Mr. Godley well puts it, ejusd,em Flaccitatis.

To include in an edition of this kind English renderings by well-known living verse-writers is an innovation so bold that it could only be justified by very marked success. On that score, however, the editor has nothing to fear. Mr. Kipling and Mr. Graves have written translations which are not only readable and delightful in themselves, but show a startlingly exact understanding of the poet's thought. What could be better, merely as English verse, than this stanza of Mr. Kipling's which interprets so finely the passage beginning Monies ab arvo suspicientibua :—

" They that dig foundations deep, Fit for realms to rise upon, Little honour do they reap Of their generation, Any more than mountains gain Stature till we roach the plain."

Mr. Graves gets his effects by a daring modernity, which serves incidentally to illustrate the famous " applicability " of Horace. For Horace does very wonderfully " apply " to all places and all epochs, and sometimes in the Fifth Book he seems almost to have foreseen (with that uncanny knowledge of life he had) the sensations which we of the twentieth century have been experiencing during these years of war. Here is Mr. Gmves's rendering of the last two stanzas of Ode IX. :— " Far too long relying largely on imported foodstuffs, Rome Learns at last to stock her larder and her granaries from home, Learns to mush the propaganda of the multiplying sow. Learns to ease her Navy's vigil by the speeding of the plough."

From the same Ode it is impossible not to quote the touching lines in which Horace describes his war-time garden, and laments (in Mr. Graves's words) that "the satisfying parsnip triumphs e'er the blushing rose" :— " Friget rosarum gratis ; Minns

passim vitlemus cedere catch:bus ; exoticos floras ategit vie holcrum magis apta mcnaia."

How well they might have been written of an English garden In 1917! Surely, too, Mr. Graves is right in translating :— "

protnit Livia tticeis vappam centurionibus"

quite bluntly as "in Livia's canteen."

It is in this book that Horace speaks most freely of Virgil— for the references in the other-books are charming indeed hint few. Here is a fragment from Ode X. :—

" Immortal dead'' I hear our Virgil sigh, 'How can the dearest and the noblest die t And though his passionate appeal be vain, Now lees than over can I chide his cry."

In Ode II. an all-night talk with Virgil and Maecenas is chronicled —what an evening that must have been !—and Virgil describes how he learnt all his lore of the human heart from studying the real people about him. The poem ends thus :— " Late was the night ere Virgil ceased from telling How past and present mingled in his view, And the worn features, lit by fire indwelling. Changed to the marble mask that others knew.

Clearer uprose the murmur of the river Hurrying onward past the orchard lawn. And the tall poplars with their leaves aquiver Trembled and whispered in the breath of dawn."

" . . menrulisgue art aerate poputus Fromm comis recedes lace susurral."

(The Sapphies, by the way, are metrically of the later, the Book Four, type.) Such versions (that last was by Mr. Graves) will make the book a delight even to readers whose Latin is now only a memory of boyhood.

For all its charm, it is in the teeth of bitter opposition that the Fifth Book has established its claim to be counted as indeed the work of Horace. In his Latin Praefatio Mr. Godley tells how ono Japanese professor is still incredulous and uncivil, and how the ttetterabilis Tomirotius has announced despairingly to the world of learning that he negue caput eel neque octudatn facere passe. Now, however, that this definitive edition has seen the light, the voice of the carper will assuredly be silenced, and all lovers of good things utriusgue linguae may enjoy undis- turbed not only their five books of Horace, but also a notable work of English scholarship—and of English wit.