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He seems, indeed, to have adopted the Horatian aurea mediocritas as his motto; and the easy-going, self-indulgent philosophy of Horace he made for the time his own.

Three of the wonderful and terrible pictures of Piranesi hung in the room; these Mr. Horbury admired more for the subject-matter than for the treatment, in which he found, as he said, a certain lack of the aurea mediocritas—almost, indeed, a touch of morbidity.

To a lover of the aurea mediocritas, a twentieth-century British paterfamilias confirmed in the comfortable security of a civil life, such a predicament was absurd.

Horace's aurea mediocritas has been preached to you in vain.

The ‘aurea mediocritas’ in feeling, conduct, thought, and enjoyment is the ideal which it sets before itself.