"We owe to Horace a precious store of pointed aphorisms and shrewd comments on life, which, apart from all controversies about his place in poetry, must ever establish a kind of personal relation with his reader, and must have a permanent (perhaps an increasing) value for the world. His odes, moreover, as regards diction and metrification, are a marvelously successful experiment. Whatever may be thought about the meaning which underlies them, their form is perfection itself, and they defy imitation. No attempt to reproduce their effect in Latin or in any other language has met with even a moderate measure of success."