Page:Satires, Epistles, Art of Poetry of Horace - Coningsby (1874).djvu/183

To hear your critics for their ancients claim
Not charity, but honour and high fame.
Suppose I doubt if Atta's humorous show
Moves o'er the boards with best leg first or no,
The fathers of the city all declare
That shame has fled from Rome, and gone elsewhere;
"What! show no reverence to his sacred shade
Whose scenes great Roscius and Æsopus played?"
Perhaps with selfish prejudice they deem
That nought but what they like deserves esteem,
Or, jealous of their juniors, won't allow
That what they learnt in youth is rubbish now.
As for the pedant whose preposterous whim
Finds poetry in Numa's Salian hymn,
Who would be thought to have explored alone
A land to him and me alike unknown,
'Tis not that buried genius he regards:
No; 'tis mere spleen and spite to living bards.
Had Greece but been as carping and as cold
To new productions, what would now be old?
What standard works would there have been, to come
Beneath the public eye, the public thumb?
When, having done with fighting, Greece began
To care for trifles that refine the man,
And, borne aloft on Fortune's full flood-tide,
Went drifting on to luxury and pride,
Of athletes and of steeds by turns she raved,
Loved ivory, bronze, and marble deftly graved,