THE SHADE OF HORACE.

Evening Star, Issue 3925, 23 September 1875, Page 3

THE SHADE OF HORACE.

To the Editor.

Sir,— P,y means of a celebrat.-d_ medium of my acquaintance I have communicated with the "Shade of Horace" now inhabiting the Elysian fields. He was not in a good temper, for somebody from Adelaide had been persuading him to try South Australian wine at 21s a dozen, and he was growling fearfully. He says that he wrote "carent," and that the whole passage reads thus : Vixerc fcrtes ante, Agftinemurma Multi: sed omnes illacrymalnlus Urgentur, ignotique loug.'i Nocte, carent quia vate sacre Cann : Lib. iv. 9.

—I am, Sec, One of Horace's Admirers,

Dunedin, September 21. [We thank our correspondent for giving us the text from Horace. Two works in our possession, professing to quote the passage, use " carebant," and not having a copy of Horace, and our Latin, through fifty years' neglect, having become rather rusty, we could not venture to decide which is right without scholarly help. e * m " s *' le more needful, as we may' like some of our contempoiaries, be tempted to the ;nobbery of using Latin second hand quotations ca!P ulate d to darken the meaning of what may <3* as shortly, more clearly, and equally elegautly, ue expressed in English; and should this very hue, so misty apart from its context, become the subject of the temptation, we can now have no doubt how to write it.—El). 'E.S.']