_Horatii curiosa felicitas_--this, one of the earliest criticisms made on the _Odes,_ remains the phrase which most completely describes their value. Such minute elaboration, on so narrow a range of subject, and within such confined limits of thought and feeling, could only be redeemed from dulness by the perpetual felicity--something between luck and skill--that was Horace's secret. How far it was happy chance, how far deliberately aimed at and attained, is a question which brings us before one of the insoluble problems of art; we may remind ourselves that, in the words of the Greek dramatist Agathon, which Aristotle was so fond of quoting, skill and chance in all art cling close to one another. "Safe in his golden mediocrity," to use the words of his own counsel to Licinius, Horace has somehow or another taken deep hold of the mind, and even the imagination, of mankind. This very mediocrity, so fine, so chastened, so certain, is in truth as inimitable as any other great artistic quality; we must fall back on the word genius, and remember that genius does not confine itself within the borders of any theory, but works its own will.
With the publication of the three books of the _Odes,_ and the first book of the _Epistles,_ Horace's finest and maturest work was complete. In the twelve years of his life which were still to run he published but little, nor is there any reason to suppose that he wrote more than he published. In 17 B.C., he composed, by special command, an ode to be sung at the celebration of the Secular Games. The task was one in which he was much hampered by a stringent religious convention, and the result is interesting, but not very happy. We may admire the skill with which formularies of the national worship are moulded into the sapphic stanza, and prescribed language, hardly, if at all, removed from prose, is made to run in stately, though stiff and monotonous, verse; but our admiration is of the ingenuity, not of the poetry. The _Jubilee Ode_ written by Lord Tennyson is curiously like the _Carmen Seculare_ in its metrical ingenuities, and in the way in which the unmistakeable personal note of style sounds through its heavy and formal movement.