The most enduring result of this munificence, more enduring even than the noble ruins of temples and theatres--the visible monuments preserved from that age--is the finished art of the verse of Virgil and Horace. By the liberality of the Emperor, Virgil was able to devote to the composition of his two great works nearly twenty years of 'unhasting and unresting' labour in the beautiful scenery of Campania. The wealth and lands at the disposal of Maecenas enabled Horace to change the wearisome routine and enervating pleasures of Rome for hours of happy inspiration among the Sabine Hills or in the cool mountain air of Praeneste, amid the gardens and streams of Tibur or by the bright shores of Baiae(55). To the liberality of their patrons these poets owed not only the leisure and freedom from the ordinary cares of life(56), which allowed them to give all their thought and the unimpaired freshness of their genius to their art, but the opportunity of enjoying under the most favourable circumstances that source of happiness and inspiration which has given its most distinctive charm to their poetry--the beauty of Italian Nature. It is only in their appreciation of the living beauty of the world for its own sake (and apart from divine or human associations) that the great Roman poets possess an interest beyond that of the poets of any other age or country, with the exception of the English poets of the present century. Nowhere is the familiar charm of a well-loved spot suggested in truer and more graceful words than these:--
Te flagrantis atrox hora Caniculae Nescit tangere; tu frigus amabile Fessis vomere tauris Praebes, et pecori vago, etc.(57)
Nor can any lines express better a real love for the actual beauty of familiar scenes combined with an imaginative longing for the ideal beauty consecrated by old poetic associations,--like to that which in modern times has often driven our Northern poets and artists across the Alps,--than the
Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes; Flumina amem silvasque inglorius. O ubi campi Spercheosque, et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis Taygeta, etc.(58)
The literature of the Augustan Age has often been compared with that of England in the first half of the eighteenth century. In so far as each literature is the literature of town life, in so far as it has a moral and didactic purpose, the comparison holds good. The Satires and Epistles of Horace present a parallel both to the poetical Satires of Pope, which in outward form are imitated from them, and still more to the prose Essays of the Spectator. They resemble those Essays in their union of humour and seriousness, in the use they make of character-painting, anecdote, and moral reflection, in the justice and at the same time the limitation of their criticism both on life and literature, in the colloquial ease combined with the studied propriety of their style. But while Horace, in addition to his powers as a moralist and painter of character, ranks high among those poets who enable us to feel the secret and the charm of Nature, latent in particular places, the only period of English literature from which this power is absent is that of which Addison and Pope are among the chief representatives. A similar superiority in this respect may be claimed for the Augustan poetry over that of the Age of Louis XIV. As was said before, French criticism points to Racine as a genius with a certain moral affinity to Virgil; but it equally acknowledges his inferiority as the interpreter of Nature. 'C'est cet amour,' says M. Sainte-Beuve, 'cette pratique de la nature champêtre qui a un peu manqué à notre Racine, dont le goût et le talent de peindre ont été presque uniquement tournés du côté de la nature morale.'