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I grieve to say that the proteges and parasites of Maecenas deserted him in a body; nay, they openly alleged that it was the true artistic nature and refinement of Somers that had always attracted them, and that a man like Rushbrook, who bought pictures by the yard, equally of the unknown struggling artist and the famous masters, was no true patron of Art.
It might be Maecenas, the holder of the purse-strings, a man who could not check his ambition to express himself whether in prose or verse.
Gloom was already beginning to gather round the Imperial household; the influence of Maecenas, the great support of letters for the last twenty years, was fast on the wane. In the words just quoted, with their half-sad and half- mocking echo of the famous passage of Lucretius, Horace bids farewell to poetry.
This elder Dalberg, who some years later became dubiously prominent in connection with Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine, was now residing at Erfurt as Coadjutor to the Elector of Mainz and expecting to become Elector himself on the death of his superior. He was an energetic, good-natured man, not free from ostentatious fussiness, and he enjoyed the role of Maecenas.
First, an effort should be made towards the purificatior of family-life: a pretty hopeless task, wherein at last he was forced to banish his own daughter for notorious evil-living. He made laws; and it may be supposed that they had some effect in time. A literary impulse towards high dignified ideals, however, may be much more effective than laws. He had Maecenas with his circle of poets.
My noble captain, Jack Chase, rather patronised Lemsford, and he would stoutly take his part against scores of adversaries. Frequently, inviting him up aloft into his top, he would beg him to recite some of his verses; to which he would pay the most heedful attention, like Maecenas listening to Virgil, with a book of Aeneid in his hand.
He went to Germany, where he printed his version of the "Henriade," having discovered a Maecenas in the person of the Elector Palatin. After that he wandered about Europe for twelve years, and died in a London prison in 1788.
Of the Augustan elegiac poets, Sextus Propertius, a native of Assisi in Umbria, and introduced at a very early age to the circle of Maecenas, is much the most striking and interesting figure, not only from the formal merit of his poetry, but as representing a type till then almost unknown in ancient literature. Of his life little is known.
"Ah," said Maecenas quickly, "but just there you betray yourself." He hesitated a moment and then went on as if the words were welling up from reluctant depths in his own experience. "Flaccus, you have never loved a woman, have you?" Horace smiled whimsically. "Not to the extent of surrendering my standards," he said. "So far Mercury has always rescued me in time from both Mars and Venus."
The comprehensive and very thorough curriculum of studies now eagerly commenced by Edna, and along which she was gently and skilfully guided by the kind hand of the teacher, furnished the mental aliment for which she hungered, gave constant and judicious exercise to her active intellect, and induced her to visit the quiet parsonage library as assiduously as did Horace, Valgius, and Virgil the gardens on the Esquiline where Maecenas held his literary assize.
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