By Edward Oliver
Pleydell-Bouverie. (Griffith, Farren and Co.)

(5) All But: A Chronicle of Laxenford Life. By Pen Oliver, F.R.C.S.
(Kegan Paul.)

A LITERARY PILGRIM

(Pall Mall Gazette, April 17, 1886.)

Antiquarian books, as a rule, are extremely dull reading. They give us
facts without form, science without style, and learning without life. An
exception, however, must be made for M. Gaston Boissier's Promenades
Archeologiques. M. Boissier is a most pleasant and picturesque writer,
and is really able to give his readers useful information without ever
boring them, an accomplishment which is entirely unknown in Germany, and
in England is extremely rare.

The first essay in his book is on the probable site of Horace's country-
house, a subject that has interested many scholars from the Renaissance
down to our own day. M. Boissier, following the investigations of Signor
Rosa, places it on a little hill over-looking the Licenza, and his theory
has a great deal to recommend it. The plough still turns up on the spot
the bricks and tiles of an old Roman villa; a spring of clear water, like
that of which the poet so often sang, 'breaks babbling from the hollow
rock,' and is still called by the peasants Fonte dell' Oratini, some
faint echo possibly of the singer's name; the view from the hill is just
what is described in the epistles, 'Continui montes nisi dissocientur
opaca valle'; hard by is the site of the ruined temple of Vacuna, where
Horace tells us he wrote one of his poems, and the local rustics still go
to Varia (Vicovaro) on market days as they used to do when the graceful
Roman lyrist sauntered through his vines and played at being a country
gentleman.

M. Boissier, however, is not content merely with identifying the poet's
house; he also warmly defends him from the charge that has been brought
against him of servility in accepting it. He points out that it was only
after the invention of printing that literature became a money-making
profession, and that, as there was no copyright law at Rome to prevent
books being pirated, patrons had to take the place that publishers hold,
or should hold, nowadays. The Roman patron, in fact, kept the Roman poet
alive, and we fancy that many of our modern bards rather regret the old
system. Better, surely, the humiliation of the sportula than the
indignity of a bill for printing! Better to accept a country-house as a
gift than to be in debt to one's landlady! On the whole, the patron was
an excellent institution, if not for poetry at least for the poets; and
though he had to be propitiated by panegyrics, still are we not told by
our most shining lights that the subject is of no importance in a work of
art? M. Boissier need not apologise for Horace: every poet longs for a
Maecenas.

An essay on the Etruscan tombs at Corneto follows, and the remainder of
the volume is taken up by a most fascinating article called Le Pays de
l'Eneide. M. Boissier claims for Virgil's descriptions of scenery an
absolute fidelity of detail.