In the fourteenth and final book in the Classical Inter/Faces series edited by Paul Cartledge and Susanna Braund, Stephen Harrison examines the nineteenth-century reception of Horace by poets and novelists, classical scholars, commentators and translators. This study of the Victorian reception of Horace builds on previous scholarship such as Norman Vance's The Victorians and Ancient Rome (1997), Vance's essay in C. Martindale (ed.), Horace Made New (1993), 199–216, and Christopher Stray's Classics Transformed (1998), all of which emphasise the prominence of Horace's poetry in the formal education of boys. H. argues that Horace was constructed in the period as an ‘honorary Victorian gentleman’ (20), and that the use of Horatian allusion in literary texts ‘evoke[s] a shared world of masculine elite education and its social prestige’ (19). With a few exceptions, some of them fictional (such as the hero of Hardy's Jude the Obscure), the appreciators of Horace considered in this volume belong to an influential but relatively narrow spectrum of Victorian society. Apart from the novelist George Eliot and the poet Christina Rossetti, women writers are largely absent, reflecting Horace's relatively limited appeal to readers outside public schools and university by comparison with more widespread responses to Virgil and Homer. While the Odes, in particular, were familiar to men who had been educated at public or grammar schools, the association with hours of drilling and construing could stifle the power of the verse, as in Byron's allusion to Horace's Odes 1.9 in Canto IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The speaker laments that he takes no pleasure in Horace's poetry, even as the view of Mount Soracte brings the ode forcibly to mind: ‘Then farewell, Horace; whom I hated so, / Not for thy faults, but mine: it is a curse / To understand, not feel thy lyric flow, / To comprehend, but never love thy verse’ (IV.685–8).

The Victorian chapters of this volume are framed by a survey of responses to Horace from the Restoration until 1830 and a concluding section which covers the twentieth century and extends into the present. The timespan of this short volume is ambitious, and the discussion in these sections offers a relatively superficial contextualisation. In the chapters on the Victorian reception of Horace there is more depth, but the number of texts included inevitably renders the space devoted to each one limited. The first of the Victorian chapters is concerned with translations, commentaries and literary criticism, identifying the prudish strategies by which scholars sought to render the misogynistic and homoerotic sections of certain poems suitable for a readership of boys and young men. Criticisms of Horace as lacking in energy and being dependent on Greek literature for inspiration are too easily dismissed here as ‘traditional Victorian views’ (26). In two chapters on responses to Horace in Victorian poetry and one on the novel, H. usefully enumerates many verbal allusions and thematic parallels. In the first chapter on poetry, H. comments on Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough and Edward FitzGerald. With substantial passages quoted from Horace's text and Victorian translations, there is relatively little space for commentary on the poets’ translations and reworkings of Horatian poems. Some interesting observations suggest that a fuller account would be worth pursuing — for example, Tennyson's response to Horace's allusion to a passage in the Aeneid, but here the reference is noted in passing as ‘a suturing of the two greatest Roman poets’ (61). Readers whose interest is captured by this account of Tennyson's allusions to Latin literature can find a more comprehensive treatment in A. A. Markley's Stateliest Measures: Tennyson and the Literature of Greece and Rome (2004). Similarly, H.’s commentary on Arnold and Clough usefully supplements recent scholarship published in Volume 4 of the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, edited by Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace (2015). H.’s survey of novelists such as Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot and Hardy again offers some telling details which invite more extensive commentary on the significance of Horace for these authors.

There is much to discover in H.’s second chapter on poetry, which engages with a more various collection of poems on Horatian themes, with many of the works discussed written by gentlemen whose pursuit of literary and scholarly endeavours was a recreation from public life. This chapter focuses on humorous modernising reworkings, such as W. M. Thackeray's transformation of the Persian elegance which Horace rejects in Odes 1.38 into ‘Frenchified fuss’ (92). The assumption that Horace's poetry can be easily appropriated to represent the modern world resulted in the creation of such odd parodic hybrids as G. C. Oxenden's The Railway Horace and the Anglo-Indian Horace of G. O. Trevelyan's The Competition Wallah. This chapter illuminates most clearly the sophisticated flair with which Horace could be incorporated into the experience of a particular social group, and the extent to which the poetry of Horace was seen to be adaptable to the modern world.