Although Charles Francis Adams had read in Horace’s poetry over a period of months in 1825 just after his college graduation (vol. 2:11–19, above), and in the summer of 1831 after an extended study of his De Arte Poetica and other classic examples in the critical genre had concluded of Horace’s essay, “I know nothing in its way superior to it” (vol. 4:109–110, above), it was not until he took up the poet again early in 1833 that he came to a full realization of Horace’s powers. At the outset of this renewed effort, one of the satires so struck him that he wrote, “I wonder I never read them attentively before. How admirable. Every sentiment so just in itself, so gracefully put in. I will read Horace perpetually. Make him familiar” (p. 21, below). And after a “slow perusal” of the odes that he called “tolerably thorough,” Adams concluded, “I have for the first time formed an idea of the peculiar qualities of the Poet.... I find him now possessed of the Power to fly high into the sublimest noblest regions of Poetry” (p. 142, below). His admiration for both the critic and the poet, Adams also recorded in his own copy of the Opera of Horace, London, 1824, in comments that are evident on the pages from the volume here illustrated.

The copy which Charles Francis Adams annotated has the text of J. M. Gesner but is without any scholarly apparatus. It was primarily to remedy this lack that, as Adams noted on the flyleaf, he supplied marginalia principally drawn from a consultation of the more scholarly French edition of Dacier and Sanadon, 8 vols., Amsterdam, 1735, and that of Zeunius, Leipzig, 1802 (the first of these is among John Adams’ books now at the Boston Public Library; the second, along with the copy annotated, is in the Stone Library at Quincy; see p. 22 and 105, below). In addition to those annotations that compare the judgments of the critics or that undertake the elucidation of words or passages, a number of them express the reader’s own aesthetic or moral judgments.