Laudator Temporis Acti

T.E. Page, introduction to S.E. Winbolt, The Horace Pocket Book (Praecepta Horatiana) (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1914), pp. vi-vii:

Men continually read the classics less—for what use are they in a foreign restaurant?—and of those who so read them fewer are of the sort to either understand or enjoy Horace. Scholarship has of late become very serious and solemn. Ceaselessly busied about manuscripts, emendations, epigraphy, folk-lore, archaeology and the like, or labouring wearily through Teutonic treatises, classical students now know little of that slippered ease without which the genial old poet wholly refuses intimacy. He claims to sit with you in the snuggery and by the fireside. There and then only he will make himself thoroughly at home, and there no one talks with a more pleasant wit or tells a story better than this fat, sleek-skinned little gentleman, whose words flow so easily, whose eye twinkles so goodhumouredly, who is so polished, so modest, and, above all, so wise.

Fat and little: Suetonius, Life of Horace (habitu corporis brevis fuit atque obesus). Sleek-skinned: Horace, Epistles 1.4.15 (nitidum bene curata cute).