 Pope Urban VIII wrote voluminously in Horatian meters, including an ode on gout.Horace maintained a central role in the education of English-speaking elites right up until the 1960s.A pedantic emphasis on the formal aspects of language-learning at the expense of literary appreciation may have made him unpopular in some quarters yet it also confirmed his influencea tension in his reception that underlies Byron's famous lines from "Childe Harold" (Canto iv, 77)