Our observations and inquiries at Cincinnati gave us a similar good impression of the general character of the free coloured residents of that city, and a clergyman there told us that he considered them superior to the bulk of Irish and German immigrants.

In their present circumstances there is a sense in which the longer emancipation is delayed, the less will the slaves be prepared for it. The iron is eating into their souls. Many of them will

"No more with idiot joy

Dance to the sound and glitter of their chains.” They know their rights as men, and it requires no great discernment to see through the flimsy covering that but ill conceals their inward pangs. Docile, forgiving and gentle as the race is, we heard from several with whom we conversed, when they felt they could trust us, expressions of a burning sense of wrong. Let these feelings still be trampled upon, and they will deepen and increase, and spread with epidemic rapidity, and add immensely to the difficulties and dangers of the question. The pressure

competence, and sometimes to wealth, against obstacles that would discourage a great many white men. Take them altogether, I know of no class of persons that, in the last ten years, have made such rapid improvement as these people in Philadelphia. What they have done is the best criterion of what they are capable of doing, and what, with fair opportunities, they are likely to do. There is one idea that has often suggested itself to my mind in contemplating the condition and progress of these people, which may perhaps seem strange in such connection. It is the nobility of human nature in itself considered. I have often, it is true, been struck with the same idea from other sources. It is a natural thought to any one who looks at what mankind have done, and especially what the great men of the world have done. When we think of Shakspeare and Gibbon, of Kant and Neander, in the world of books; when we remember the Reformation and the American revolution, and the names of Luther and Washington, we cannot fail to be impressed at once with a feeling of awe and of gratification at what man, as man, is, and what he can do. But when I see a people pinioned by so many discouragements, and bruised under such a complicated and heavy mass of difficulties as the coloured people, steadily and surely elevating themselves above their circumstances; when I behold the immense mountain of prejudice that rests upon them, tottering and almost rising bodily from its base, I am struck with a degree of admiration and amazement that I seldom feel on any other occasion, at the intrinsic strength and infinite tendencies of humanity."

* We shall not soon forget the tone and expression of one man-a slave pew-opener of a Baptist Church-when he told us that nothing should induce him to marry as long as he remained a slave; or the conversation of another who walked with us to point out the cemetery for coloured people-the castefeeling is carried so far as to call for separate resting-places even for the dead -in the neighbourhood of one of the Southern cities.

of the yoke will be aggravated by the spirit in which it is borne. There will come the passions of degradation, to sully the longings for redemption. There will be a chaos without the materials for a creation. Deliverance will be unassociated with liberty, and the tiger of Revenge will be ready to crouch for his prey amid the thickets that grow around the fountain of freedom. Relief from oppression will be indissolubly connected with vengeance upon the oppressor; and instead of dashing the cup of trembling to the earth, they who have hitherto drunk the bitter draught will desire to preserve it with malignant care for the lips of their enemies.

One thing is certain. This system must come to an end. It is not in Nature, it is not in Providence, it is not in Humanity, that such an evil should endure. Whether its termination shall be accompanied with blessings, and rejoicings, and prayer, and praise; or whether it shall go down amid curses, conflict, confusion and blood, will depend upon the Faith, the Justice and Humanity of the American people. May they have strength and wisdom to choose the better part!

ART. VI.—THE ODES OF HORACE.

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.

AMONG literary men, Horace pre-eminently enjoys the privileges of a pocket poet. We imagine that of those who in any degree prolong the studies of youth into the recreation of riper years, there are few but possess a portable Horace, bearing marks of adventure and long usage. If there were no other reason, the very variety of form and subject which is characteristic of his works, would go far to produce this result. There may be found in them something congenial to all moods and circumstances. Were the power of fluently reading Greek more common than it is, we apprehend that it would but rarely be possible to raise the imagination to the epic height of "Achilles' wrath," and the fate of "windy Troy." It is only in moments of classic enthusiasm that the charms of style can overpower the triteness of the story, and awake a new interest in Greek or Roman annalist. One might as well think of pocketing Samson Agonistes as the Greek Tragedians. To read Aristophanes under a tree, or in a railway carriage, is an exploit to be compassed only by German erudition. The sweetness of Virgil cloys upon the taste; the poetry of Lucretius is like rare oases, bright indeed, but buried in philosophical Saharas; the bitter strength of Juvenal, pleasant only when taken like olives to enhance the flavour of a more kindly nutriment. Horace, and Horace only, never tires. The product of his muse may not be of the highest conceivable quality, but then it rarely fails to please. There is a sufficient earnestness of tone to awake the reader's moral sympathies, and a strong smack of daily practical life to chain his amused attention. The patriotic despair which holds up to imitation the Phocæan example:

"Vos quibus est virtus, muliebrem tollite luctum,
Etrusca præter et volate littora.

Nos manet oceanus circum vagus arva :"

alternates with the praise of the Sabine farm, and the "domus Albuneæ resonantis," and the Bandusian fountain, and the peaceful happiness of a rural life. Now the melancholy philosophy, with no vision beyond the grave:

"Pallida mors æquo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas,

Regumque turres,"

and now its natural and logical consequence-the heedless mirth, the wine dating like the poet from the consulship of Manlius, the ivy crown of Bacchus, and the Thracian revel. Here is enunciated in lofty verse a moral precept which has been a classical commonplace since the revival of letters; and there the loose verse records excesses in regard to which the Muse should have held her finger on her lips. There is perhaps no mood, except that of Christian devotion, which may not find in some part of Horace's works an apt expression.

But there are other reasons why Horace should be a favourite poet among men, and especially among those men of business who have retained enough of their early proficiency to be still able to find pleasure in his pages. His style is never tumid. It is best characterized as he himself characterizes Pyrrha's beauty, as "simplex munditiis." While rising, in a natural conciseness, to meet the highest demands of his imagination, it is never puffed and swelled into a bombastic magniloquence-a rare merit indeed among lyric poets. And then, under no circumstances whatever, does Horace write nonsense. Prosaic he may sometimes be, but never sentimental. So that, when he indulges in a melancholy reflection on the shortness of life and the vanity of human efforts, or wakes for a moment from his epicurean heedlessness to celebrate the rare virtue of the man:

"Integer vitæ, scelerisque purus:"

or the firm self-reliance of the just, whom

Non civium ardor prava jubentium,
Non vultus instantis tyranni,
Mente qualit solida,❞—

we have a firm conviction that he is in earnest. This, in combination with the elegant brevity of the expression, is perhaps the reason why the moralizings of Horace seem to have a greater authority than belongs to the per

sonal character of the poet. We suspect of being professional, a piety which intrudes its phrases upon the dinner-table. We do not trust the active benevolence of the lady whose sensibility weeps over every novel. If a man's honesty is always upon his lips, we have an undefined fear lest it should be nowhere else. And so in Horace's serious moods-he affects much as when we hear the exhortations of the pulpit echoed from unclerical lips.

Again, he is the most autobiographical of classical poets, and his verse has a personal as well as a poetical interest. What trustworthy information we possess as to his life, nas been chiefly gleaned from his own hints. There would need no more to endear him to the reader's sympathies than the beautiful passage (1 Sat. vi. 71. seq.) where he narrates how his father—a poor freedman who earned a living by attending at auctions-thought the school at Venusia too poor for his darling boy, and brought him to Rome; sent him to be taught among sons of senators and knights; and in his anxiety for the lad's morals, himself performed the servile office of the pædagogus, attending him to and from the school. It is a burst of honest gratitude and filial piety in an ungrateful and an impious age. We are told how, after many vicissitudes of fortune, having studied at Athens, the great Roman university, and, like many a braver man, left his shield behind him at Philippi, and written himself into satiric notoriety at Rome, he is at last introduced to Maecenas by poets of no less renown than Virgil and Varius. For nine months the minister neglected the young adventurer, little dreaming, perhaps, how much his own fame depended on the issue. At last Mæcenas gave Horace his familiar friendship and the much-loved Sabine farm, and Horace repaid the obligation by bestowing on Mæcenas an honourable immortality. And thenceforth our poet's productions are the reflex of his happy, if somewhat careless, existence: now he joins his patron on a journey to Brundusium; and now offers him rest and a cask of aged wine at his cottage at Tivoli; distributes among his friends now moral warnings, and now lyric invitations, and now epistles full of kindly satire and keen observation; gives his fancy a wider range to sing worthily the praises of Augustus; and again con