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 caede 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}

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,

{ 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.

{ 3} In Mr. Hogarth's Caricatura.

{ 5} "Poor Pope was always a hand-to-mouth liar."--Pope, by Leslie Stephen, 139.

{ 6} The Greek [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], mentioned by Lucian and Theocritus, was the magical weapon of the Australians-- the turndun.