James Hampton Kirkland visited Italy, Paris, and London. Kirkland was appointed Professor of Latin at Vanderbilt University in 1886. Two of his colleagues were Baskervill and Smith, his former professors at Wofford. Another colleague was Milton W. Humphreys, a Confederate veteran who also received a PhD from the University of Leipzig. Two more colleagues had also studied at the University of Leipzig: Waller Deering and Alexander R. Hohlfeld. He edited the works of Horace, a Roman lyric poet in a collection entitled "Horace: Satires and Epistles", which he published in 1893. Meanwhile, Kirkland was appointed as chancellor in 1893. He was only thirty-three
Horace borrowed from Archaic Greece, employing hexameters in his "Satires" and "Epistles", and iambs in his "Epodes", all of which were relatively easy to adapt into Latin forms. His "Odes" featured more complex measures, including alcaics and sapphics, which were sometimes a difficult fit for Latin structure and syntax. Despite these traditional metres, he presented himself as a partisan in the development of a new and sophisticated style. He was influenced in particular by Hellenistic aesthetics of brevity, elegance and polish, as modeled in the work of Callimachus. In modern literary theory, a distinction is often made between immediate personal experience