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with the working men. Looking through and beyond the present industrial crisis, which will probably last some time, we feel persuaded that its ultimate tendency will be to elevate the social, moral, intellectual, and political condition of the labouring classes in this country. Meantime, however, we may prepare ourselves for no small amount of irritation and disturbance before the conflicting claims of capital and labour can be thoroughly reconciled. In those good old times,' to which a certain class of sentimental political economists would willingly carry us back, the legislature would have been called on to aid the employers of labour at such a time as the present. The first notice relating to wages, which occurs in our Statute Book, is an order for reducing them from the extravagant height to which they had risen immediately after the great pestilence in the reign of Edward III. The famous statute of labourers to which reference has been made by so many writers who seem ignorant of the circumstances which calied forth that enactment, was passed in 1351 for the express purpose of preventing the labouring classes from reaping any advantage from the extraordinary demand for labour, caused by the decrease in the number of the people. By the reduction in the price of food and the rise in the price of labour, the mass of the people at that time must have been about as well off as the labourers of Australia were before the gold discoveries took place, when a man could earn as much bread and mutton in a day as an English labourer could purchase by a week's labour. Edward III. and his parliament soon put an end to that state of things, by enacting that any man or woman having no visible means of subsistence must serve any person who might choose to hire him or her, and must not take higher wages than were customary before the pestilence. Fortunately for the labouring classes of the nineteenth century, they do not live under such rule. Instead of being obliged to work for any person who wishes to hire him, at such a rate of wages as Parliament may fix, the working man is at perfect liberty to accept or refuse any offer of employment which may be made to him, or, should he fancy that he can improve his position by going abroad, there is no law now to prevent him, as there was up to the end of last century.

Such being the case, it becomes all the more necessary that the employers should understand how to act in the critical times in which their lot has been cast. If they wish to maintain those amicable relations with the labouring classes, which are indispensably necessary to the proper working of our vast industrial and commercial system, they must not seek to entrench themselves within the circle of their own order, or rely upon mere defensive

union among themselves, as the only method of meeting the demands of the working men. In all cases where an advance of wages is asked, employers ought to be prepared, if possible, with a ready answer. If the state of the trade will enable them to grant the request for an advance of wages, let them do so at once. If, after due investigation, they find that they cannot advance the rate of wages without injury to the men as well as to themselves, let them clearly explain why they are unable to do so. No false notions of dignity should prevent them from taking such precautions to prevent angry collisions. They may complain that the working classes do not listen to reason; that they allow themselves to be misled by Chartist and Socialist demagogues; and may therefore conclude that the only way to meet the present movement is by taking up a firm attitude of resistance. In our opinion, they could not commit a greater or a more dangerous mistake. From all we have seen of the working classes, we feel persuaded that, notwithstanding their independent position, they were never more willing to listen to reason than they are at the present moment; and that, were the employers united as to the course they ought to pursue, it lies mainly with them to say in what manner the present movement will terminate. If the middle classes will only do their best to meet the working men in a spirit of conciliation and fairness, neither Chartist nor Socialist demagogues will be able to obtain any considerable influence over them.

ART. VIII.—(1.) The Works of Quintus Horatius Flaccus, illustrated chiefly from the Remains of Ancient Art. With a Life by the Rev. HENRY HART MILMAN, Canon of St. Peter's, Rector of St. Margaret's, Westminster. London: Murray. 1849. (2.) The Odes of Horace, translated into unrhymed metres, with Introductions and Notes. By F. W. NEWMAN, Professor of Latin, University College, London. London: John Chapman. 1853.

FANCY a frank and highly-educated young fellow, of four-andtwenty, short, and rather thick-set in body, with weak eyes, and a strong, compact forehead, turned adrift upon London with a very slender purse, and nothing particular to do, and you will have an idea of our friend, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, at the time when he returned to Rome, after his escapade at Philippi (B. C. 41).

The antecedents of the poet, to use the modern phrase, are known to every scholar. Born at Venusia, a small Italian town,

EDUCATION AND EARLY LIFE.

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some hundred and fifty miles from Rome, in the year B. c. 65, he had for his father a very respectable freedman, who, having made a little money as a collector of payments at auctions, had bought a small property, and determined to give his son a good education. When he was about twelve years of age, his father, not satisfied with the grammar-school of Venusia, kept at that time by one Mr. Flavius, had him removed to Rome, and placed under the care of Orbilius of Beneventum, an old military man, who had turned schoolmaster, and whose academy was, for many a day, one of the first in Rome. Here, during the bustle of the Cæsar-and-Pompey times, Horace read such Latin and Greek authors as were then in fashion for educational purposes-more especially Homer, and the old Latin poet, Livius Andronicus, whose name was ever afterwards disagreeably associated in Horace's mind with the floggings he used to get from Orbilius. The plagosus Orbilius,' indeed, must have been a formidable personage in the imagination of half the young men of Rome; for he lived to be a hundred years old, and must, therefore, have flogged at least two generations of Horace's contemporaries. In his eighteenth year, or just about the time when the Cæsar-andPompey business came to an end, by the accession of Cæsar to the sole dictatorship, Horace went to Athens,-as was then customary with young Romans, to complete his studies, by a course in philosophy and science, under Greek masters. He had been four years here, when the shock of Cæsar's assassination once more threw the world into confusion, and obliged all Romans to range themselves either with Antony and Octavian, or with the republicans, Brutus and Cassius. Probably as much from the accident of being in Greece at the time, as from any real political conviction, Horace and a number of his fellowstudents joined the republican standard. Horace served with Brutus in Macedonia and Asia, had a commission given him as military tribune, and actually commanded a legion. The probability, therefore, is, that Brutus was rather ill provided. with officers. The well-known satire, in which Horace tells the story of the appearance of the two litigants, Persius and Rupilius Rex, before Brutus, at Clazomenæ, is, doubtless, a personal reminiscence of this period of the poet's life. Here it is:-

'In what way the mongrel (half Greek, half Roman) Persius took vengeance on the filth and venom of Rupilius, surnamed King, is known, I should imagine, to all the blear-eyed, and all the barbers about town. This Persius, being rich, had immense quantities of business of one kind or another, at Clazomena, and, among the rest, a troublesome lawsuit with our friend King. A hard fellow was Persius, and more than King's match any day-confident, blustering, and so

bitter-tongued, he would have beaten your Sisennæ and Barri hollow. I return to King. When nothing could be settled in a friendly way between them, (for, you know, when people are at war, they are troublesome and unmanageable in the same proportion as they are brave: between Hector, the son of Priam, for example, and the spirited Achilles, the feud was of that capital nature, that only the ultimate destruction of one of them could end it; and this for no other reason than that the bravery of both was consummate; whereas, if discord sets two cowards by the ears, or if a strife breaks out between two who are not equally matched, as between Diomed and the Lycian Glaucus, the heavier fellow of the two walks off, and saves his skin by sending his adversary presents,) Brutus, at this time, being Prætor in rich Asia, what happens but a regular single combat between Rupilius and Persius, a pair so nearly matched, that Bacchius and Bithus were not nearer! Impetuous they rush into the pleading, each of them a treat to see. Persius states his case amid roars of laughter from the whole assembly. He praises Brutus, and praises the guard; he calls Brutus the sun of Asia, and all his companions salutary stars in the firmament, always excepting King; and King, he says, is a dog, who has come like a star baleful to husbandSo on and on he rushes, like a wintery flood over a channel where the axe has seldom come. As he is blazing away in this witty and copious manner, the Prænestine (King) pitches into him with some witticisms got from the vineyard-King, a hardy and unconquered vine-dresser, to whom many a roadside passenger had been obliged to yield when King's voice bawled 'cuckoo' after him. But Persius, his Greek temper having been sufficiently sprinkled with the Italian vinegar, could contain himself no longer, but roared out, By the great gods, Brutus, you who are in the habit of taking off kings, why don't you throttle this one? it is a piece of work, believe me, quite in your way.''

men.

'A miserable clench,' says Dryden, 'for Horace to record. I have heard honest Mr.Swan make many a better, and yet have had the grace to hold my countenance.' Begging Dryden's pardon, and Dean Milman's too, we think the story a very good story. It is well worth the attention of any biographer of Brutus; and if Horace had but a few more such reminiscences of his life, as an attaché of Brutus, in Asia Minor and Macedonia, he had nicer memories of it, we are happy to think, than the battle of Philippi. It was this battle, as all know, that put an end to the poet's soldiering. (B. c. 42.) Like many a bolder man on that day, he had to throw away his shield, and run for his life; out of which incident, as alluded to by the poet himself, commentators have made a great deal more than was ever required of them. Soldiering, however, was certainly not Horace's trade; and grieved, as he must have been, at the consequences of the battle to Brutus and the Republicans, he was not republican enough

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to hold out any longer, when he saw that, by returning to Rome, and offering to live peaceably under the ruling powers, he might bid adieu altogether to camps and campaigns. Accordingly, he did return to Rome, arriving there, it is probable, just about the time when the young Octavian was restoring Italy to order by proscriptions and confiscations in the name of the Triumvirate, and laying the foundation of his own future supremacy. The other triumvirs, Antony and Lepidus, were, in the mean time, at work in other parts of the empire-Antony in the East, where he was swaggering about as a conqueror, and getting near and nearer to Egypt and Cleopatra. It was with Octavian, afterwards known as Augustus Cæsar, and then acting under the counsels of such statesmen as Vipsanius Agrippa, and Cilnius Mæcenas, that the Romans and Italians had more particularly to deal. With many others, whose republicanism had placed them in a similar predicament, Horace found himself under a cloud. His father had died a year or two before, during his absence; and the little property at Venusia, which was all he had to depend upon, had been included in the general confiscation, by which the triumvirs sought to punish their opponents, and reward their adherents.

In these circumstances, Horace, as he himself tells us, betook himself, as a matter of necessity, to a literary life. 'No sooner,' he says, 'had the affair of Philippi sent me home humbled, with wings clipt, and destitute of paternal house and lands, than daring poverty drove me to the making of verses'

'Paupertas impulit audax

Ut versus facerem.'

This piece of information would be more satisfactory if we knew by what particular process at that time verse-making identified itself with money-making. On this point, however, with all our knowledge of Roman customs and antiquities, we are unfortunately ignorant. How a young fellow in Horace's position proceeds now-a-days in London we know very well. Has not providence established magazines and other periodicals for the very purpose? Verses, indeed, are hardly the kind of literary ware to bring in money, even with such facilities; and yet we have only to go back a little to the halcyon times, when our publishers used to pay for volumes of poetry, and there used to be poetical squibs in our newspapers, to see that even by versemaking a livelihood might have been earned in London. But in Rome, so far as we know, there was no Fraser's Magazine, no John Bull newspaper to pay for squibs, no Punch, and no Bentley's Miscellany. Had there been a Punch, who can doubt that Horace would very soon have been on the staff of its con