difficult work well executed, and acceptable to every friend of genius and literature! but its success was by no means correspondent to the wishes of the author or of his friends.

The year before the first volume of his Demosthenes appeared, he determined to attempt the drama, and his first essay was a tragedy, entitled Eugenia. This is professedly an adaptation of the French Cenie to English feelings and habits, but it had not much success on the stage. Lord Chesterfield, in one of his letters to his son, observes, that he did not think it would have succeeded so well, considering how long our British audiences had been accustomed to murder, racks, and poison, in every tragedy: yet it affected the heart so much, that it triumphed over habit and prejudice. In a subsequent letter, he says that the boxes were crowded till the sixth night, when the pit and gallery were totally deserted, and it was dropped. Distress without death, he repeats, was not sufficient to affect a true British audience, so long accustomed to daggers, racks, and bowls of poison; contrary to Horace's rule, they desire to see Medea murder her children on the stage. The sentiments were too delicate to move them: and their hearts were to be taken by storm, not by parley.

In 1754, Mr. Francis brought out another tragedy at Covent-Garden theatre, entitled Constantine, which was equally unsuccessful, but appears to have suffered principally by the improper distribution of the parts among the actors. This he alludes to, in the dedication to lord Chesterfield, with whom he appears to have been acquainted; and intimates, at the same time, that these disappointments had induced him to take leave of the stage.

During the political contests at the beginning of the present reign, he employed his pen in defence of government, and acquired the patronage of lord Holland; who rewarded his services by the rectory of Barrow in Suffolk, and the chaplain ship of Chelsea-hospital. What were his publications on political topics, as they were anonymous, and probably dispersed among the periodical journals, cannot now be ascertained. They drew upon him, however, the wrath of Churchill, who in his Author has exhibited a portrait of Mr. Francis probably overcharged by spleen and envy. Churchill indeed was so profuse of his calumny, that, long be fore he died, his assertions had begun to lose their value. He is said to have intended to write a satirical poem, in which Francis was to make his appearance as the ordinary of Newgate. The severity of this satire was better understood at that time, when the ordinaries of Newgate were held in very little esteem, and some of them were grossly ignorant and dissolute.

Mr. Francis died at Bath, March 5, 1773, leaving a son, who in the same year was appointed one of the Supreme Council of Bengal, and is now sir Philip Francis, K. B., and M. P. for Appleby.

Of all the classical writers, Horace is by general consent allowed to be the most difficult to translate; yet so universal has been the ambition to perform this task, that scarcely an English poet can be named in whose works we do not find some part of Horace. These efforts, however, have not so frequently been directed to give the sense and local meaning of the author, as to tranfuse his satire, and adapt it to modern persons and times. But of the few who have exhibited the whole of

this interesting poet in an English dress, Mr. Francis has been supposed to have succeeded best in that which is most difficult, the lyric part, and likewise to have conveyed the spirit and sense of the original, in the Epistles and Satires, with least injury to the genius of the author. In his preface, he acknowledges his obligations to Dr. Dunkin, a poet of some celebrity, and an excellent classical scholar.

While Horace is accounted the most difficult, he is perhaps of all Latin authors the most popular; and accordingly we find more frequent quotations from him than from any other. He is in Latin what Pope is in English; and the reason is honourable to his talents, to the refinement and elegance of his sentiments, and to the universal range he took through the extensive provinces of manners, morals, and criticism. He was contemporary with Virgil and Varius, by whose means he obtained the patronage of Mæcenas and Augustus. To Mæ cenas, he was so warmly attached, that it has been supposed, but not on suffi cient authority, that he put an end to his own life in order to follow his generous patron. It is certain that he died soon after Mæcenas, in the fifty-seventh year of his age, and in the year eighth before the Christian era.

VOL XIX

PREFACE

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# works of Horace have been always numbered among the most valuable remains of antiquity. if we may rely upon the judgment of his commentators, he has united in his lyric poetry the

enthusiasm of Pindar, the majesty of Alcæus, the tenderness of Sappho, and the charming levities of Anacreon. Yet he has beauties of his own genius, his own manner, that form his peculiar character. Many of his odes are varied with irony and satire; with delicacy and humour; with ease and pleasantry. Some of them were written in the first heat of imagination, when circumstances of time, places, persons, were strong upon him. In others, he rises in full poetical dignity; sublime in sentiments, bold in allusions, and profuse of figures; frugal of words, curious in his choice, and happily venturous in his use of them; pure in his diction, animated in his expressions, and harmonious in his numbers; artful in the plans of his poems, regular in their conduct, and happy in their execution. Surely the best attempts to translate so various an author, will require great indulgence, and any tolerable success may deserve it. But perhaps we shall better see the variety of our poet's genius by considering, if such an expression may be forgiven, the various genius of lyric poetry.

In the first ages of Greece, the lyric Muse was particularly appointed to celebrate the praises of the gods and heroes in their festivals. The noblest precepts of philosophy were enlivened by music, and animated by the language of poetry, while reason governed the raptures, which a religious enthusiasm inspired. We may therefore believe, that nothing could enter into its compositious, but what was chaste and correct, awful and sublime, while it was employed in singing the praises of gods, and immortalising the actions of men; in supporting the sacred truths of religion, and encouraging the practice of moral virtue. Such was its proper, natural character. But it soon lost this original excellence, and became debased to every light description of love, dances, feasts, gallantry, and wine. In this view it may be compared to one of its first masters, who descended (according to an expression of Quintilian) into sports and loves, although naturally formed for nobler subjects.

Yet this alteration, though it lessened its natural dignity, seems to have added to that pleasing variety, to which no other poetry can pretend. For when the skill and experience of the persons, who first cultivated the different kinds of poems, gave to each kind those numbers, which seemed most proper for it; as lyric poetry had given birth to all sorts of verse, so it preserved to itself all the measures of which they are composed, the pentameter alone excepted. Thus a variety of subjects is agreeably maintained by a variety of numbers, and they have both contributed to that free, unbounded spirit, which forms the peculiar character of lyric poetry.

In this freedom of spirit it disdains to mark the transitions, which preserve a connection in all other writings, and which naturally conduct the mind from one thought to another. From whence it must often happen, that while a translator is grammatically explaining his author, and opening his reasoning, that genius and manner, and boldness of thinking, which are effects of an immediate poetical enthusiasm, shall either be wholly lost, or greatly dissipated and enfeebled.

It is remarkable, that this kind of poetry was the first that appeared in Rome, as it was the first that was known in Greece, and was used in the same subjects by the Romans, while they had not yet áby correspondence with Greece and her learning. However, it continued in almost its first rudeness until the Augustan age, when Horace, improved by reading and imitating the Grecian poets, carried

it at once to its perfection, and, in the judgment of Quintilian, is almost the only Latin lyric poet worthy of being read.

If we should inquire into the state of lyric poetry among English writers, we shall be obliged to confess that their taste was early vitiated, and their judgment unhappily misguided, by the too great success of one man of wit, who first gave Pindar's name to a wild, irregular kind of versification, of which there is not one instance in Pindar. All his numbers are exact, and all his strophes regular. But from the authority of Cowley, supported by an inconsiderate imitation of some other eminent writers, every idler in poetry, who has not strength or industry sufficient to confine his rhymes and numbers to some constant form (which can alone give them real harmony), makes an art of wandering, and then calls his work a Pindaric ode, in which, by the same justness of criticism, his imagina. tion is as wild and licentious as his numbers are loose and irregular.

To avoid this fault, all the measures in the following translation are constantly maintained through each ode, except in the Carmen Seculare. But it may be useless to excuse particulars, when possibly the whole poem, in its present form, may be condemned. Yet by foreigners it has been called Mr. Sanadon's master-piece; and since the odes of Horace are certainly not in that order at present, in which they were originally published, it has been esteemed an uncommon proof of his critical sagacity, to have reconciled in one whole so many broken parts, that have so long perplexed the best commentators. Yet the reader will find some alteration of Mr. Sanadon's plan, for which the translator is obliged to the learned and reverend Mr. Jones, who lately published a very valuable edition of Horace.

Although it was impossible to preserve our author's measures, yet the form of his strophes has been often imitated, and, in general, there will be found a greater number of different stanzas in the translation, than in the original. One advantage there is peculiar to English stanzas, that some of them have a natural ease and fluency; others seem formed for humour and pleasantry; while a third kind has a tone of dignity and solemnity proper for sublimer subjects. Thus the measures and form of the stanza will often show the design and cast of the ode.

In the translation it has not only been endeavoured to give the poet's general meaning, but to preserve that force of expression, in which his peculiar happiness consists, and that boldness of epithets, for which one of his commentators calls him wonderful, and almost divine. Many odes, especially in the first book, have little more than choice of words and harmony of numbers to make them not unworthy of their author; and although these were really the most difficult parts of the translation, yet they will be certainly least entertaining to an English reader. In the usual manner of paraphrase or imitation, it had not been impossible to have given them more spirit, according to the taste of many a modern critic, by enlarging the poet's design, and adding to his thoughts; but, however hardy the translator may seem by his present adventurous undertaking, this was a presumption, of which he was very little capable.

It would be a tedious, useless, and ill-natured labour, to point out the faults in other versions of our poet. Let us rather acknowledge, that there are excellent lines in them, of which the present trans lator has taken as many as he could use upon his plan, and wishes, for the sake of the public, they could

be found to exceed a hundred.

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Yet still the far more valuable parts of our author remain to be considered. If in his Odes he appears with all the charms and graces and ornaments of poetry, in his Epistles and Satires he gives us the noblest precepts of philosophy, that ever formed the human heart, or improved the understanding. He tells us, that Homer shows in a clearer and more persuasive manner the beauty and advantages of virtue, the deformity and dangers of vice, than even the Stoic and Academician philosophers. Yet the morality of Homer is confined to politics; to the virtues of vices of princes, upon whom, indeed, the happiness or misery of their people depends. But in the morality of Horace, the happiness and misery of all human kind are interested. Here the gratitude and affection due to a good father for his care and tenderness are impressed upon the child. Here we are taught, that real greatness does not arise from the accident of being nobly born, or descended from a race of titled ancestors. We must imitate those virtues, to which they were indebted for their titles. Such are the sentiments of our poet's philosophy.

If his religion were a subject for our curiosity, it will appear to have been founded upon the best reasoning, of the human understanding. He asserts a supreme Being, with that noble ides