Horace | Page 4

school his martinet habits as an old soldier; and who, thanks to Horace, has become a name (_plagosus Orbilius_, Orbilius of the birch) eagerly applied by many a suffering urchin to modern pedagogues who have resorted to the same material means of inculcating the beauties of the classics. By this Busby of the period Horace was grounded in Greek, and made familiar, too familiar for his liking, with Ennius, Naevius, Pacuvius, Attius, Livius Andronicus, and other early Latin writers, whose unpruned vigour was distasteful to one who had already begun to appreciate the purer and not less vigorous style of Homer and other Greek authors. Horace's father took care that he should acquire all the accomplishments of a Roman gentleman, in which music and rhetoric were, as a matter of course, included. But, what was of still more importance during this critical period of the future poet's first introduction to the seductions of the capital, he enjoyed the advantages of his father's personal superintendence and of a careful moral training. His father went with him to all his classes, and, being himself a man of shrewd observation and natural humour, he gave the boy's studies a practical bearing by directing his attention to the follies and vices of the luxurious and dissolute society around him, showing him how incompatible they were with the dictates of reason and common-sense, and how disastrous in their consequences to the good name and happiness of those who yielded to their seductions. The method he pursued is thus described by Horace (Satires, I. 4):--
"Should then my humorous vein run wild, some latitude allow. I learned the habit from the best of fathers, who employed Some living type to stamp the vice he wished me to avoid. Thus temperate and frugal when exhorting me to be, And with the competence content which he had stored for me, 'Look, boy!' he'd say,' at Albius' son--observe his sorry plight! And Barrus, that poor beggar there! Say, are not these a sight, To warn a man from squandering his patrimonial means?' When counselling me to keep from vile amours with common queans; 'Sectanus, ape him not!' he'd say; or, urging to forswear Intrigue with matrons, when I might taste lawful joys elsewhere; 'Trebonius' fame is blurred since he was in the manner caught. The reasons why this should be shunned, and why that should be sought, The sages will explain; enough for me, if I uphold The faith and morals handed down from our good sires of old, And, while you need a guardian, keep your life pure and your name. When years have hardened, as they will, your judgment and your frame, You'll swim without a float!' And so, with talk like this, he won And moulded me, while yet a boy. Was something to be done, Hard it might be--'For this,' he'd say, 'good warrant you can quote'-- And then as model pointed to some public man of note. Or was there something to be shunned, then he would urge, 'Can you One moment doubt that acts like these are base and futile too, Which have to him and him such dire disgrace and trouble bred?' And as a neighbour's death appals the sick, and, by the dread Of dying, forces them to put upon their lusts restraint, So tender minds are oft deterred from vices by the taint They see them bring on others' names; 'tis thus that I from those Am all exempt, which bring with them a train of shames and woes."
Nor did Horace only inherit from his father, as he here says, the kindly humour and practical good sense which distinguish his satirical and didactic writings, and that manly independence which he preserved through the temptations of a difficult career. Many of "the rugged maxims hewn from life" with which his works abound are manifestly but echoes of what the poet had heard from his father's lips. Like his own Ofellus, and the elders of the race--not, let us hope, altogether bygone--of peasant-farmers in Scotland, described by Wordsworth as "Religious men, who give to God and men their dues,"--the Apulian freedman had a fund of homely wisdom at command, not gathered from books, but instinct with the freshness and force of direct observation and personal conviction. The following exquisite tribute by Horace to his worth is conclusive evidence how often and how deeply he had occasion to be grateful, not only for the affectionate care of this admirable father, but also for the bias and strength which that father's character had given to his own. It has a further interest, as occurring in a poem addressed to Maecenas, a man of ancient family and vast wealth, in the early days of that acquaintance with the poet which was afterwards to ripen into a