Horace and Thackeray Author:Grant Showerman Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Why should Thackeray have made so much greater use of Horace than of other ancient poets? Thtfact that he did so is of some significance as indicating a likeness... more » in spirit between the two men. Given that two individuals bear a resemblance in spirit, will their literary produc tions also bear a resemblance? This leads to the thesis herein advanced: That Thackeray and Horace bear great resemblances to each other both as men and as authors: as raen, in that they looked upon life in meny respects with the same eyes; and as authors, in that their methods and style show likenesses. In a treatment of Thackeray and Horace as men their outlook upon humanity and society, their lessons of life use may very properly be made of all the writings of each; but in a treatment of them as authors, it scarcely need be said that more attention will be paid to the satires and epistles of Horace and the greater novels and later essays of Thackeray; for not only do the satires and epistles approach more nearly prose composition and thus afford a more satisfactory basis of comparison, but both authors, in the compositions chapter{Section 4named, appear on the whole in their most mature and least artificial state. Especially, in comparing the two authors as to style, the satires and epistles must be taken as a basis rather than the odes and cpodes. But what justification is there for instituting a comparison between an English prose-writer of the nineteenth century of the Christian era and a Roman poet of the laet century before Christ? All men, born in Pagan or Christian era, reared under English or Italian skies, are still men, and members of the universal human family. Literature in all its forms and stages is still literature, and one undivided whole whether in Greek or French, ...« less