'Trebonius' fame is blurred since he was in the manner caught.
The reasons why this should be shunned, and why that should be
sought,
The sages will explain; enough for me, if I uphold
The faith and morals handed down from our good sires of old,
And, while you need a guardian, keep your life pure and your name.
When years have hardened, as they will, your judgment and your
frame,
You'll swim without a float!' And so, with talk like this, he won
And moulded me, while yet a boy. Was something to be done,
Hard it might be--'For this,' he'd say, 'good warrant you can
quote'--
And then as model pointed to some public man of note.
Or was there something to be shunned, then he would urge, 'Can you
One moment doubt that acts like these are base and futile too,
Which have to him and him such dire disgrace and trouble bred?'
And as a neighbour's death appals the sick, and, by the dread
Of dying, forces them to put upon their lusts restraint,
So tender minds are oft deterred from vices by the taint
They see them bring on others' names; 'tis thus that I from those
Am all exempt, which bring with them a train of shames and woes."

Nor did Horace only inherit from his father, as he here says, the
kindly humour and practical good sense which distinguish his satirical
and didactic writings, and that manly independence which he preserved
through the temptations of a difficult career. Many of "the rugged
maxims hewn from life" with which his works abound are manifestly but
echoes of what the poet had heard from his father's lips. Like his own
Ofellus, and the elders of the race--not, let us hope, altogether
bygone--of peasant-farmers in Scotland, described by Wordsworth as