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since it is true, and to the purpose: Bonum quò communis, eò melius. Juvenal, excepting only his first Satire, is in all the rest confined to the exposing of some particular vice; that he lashes, and there he sticks. His sentences are truly shining and instructive; but they are sprinkled here and there. Horace is teaching us in every line, and is perpetually moral: he had found out the skill of Virgil, to hide his sentences; to give you the virtue of them, without shewing them in their full extent; which is the ostentation of a poet, and not his art: and this Petronius charges on the authors of his time, as a vice of writing which was then growing on the age: ne sententiæ extra corpus orationis emineant: he would have them weaved into the body of the work, and not appear embossed upon it, and striking directly on the reader's view. Folly was the proper quarry of Horace, and not vice; and as there are but few notoriously wicked men, in comparison with a shoal of fools and fops, so it is a harder thing to make a man wise than to make him honest; for the will is only to be reclaimed in the one, but the understanding is to be informed in the other. There are blind sides and follies, even in the professors of moral philosophy; and there is not any one sect of them that Horace has not exposed: which, as it was not the design of Juvenal, who was wholly employed in lashing vices, some of them the most enormous that can be magined, so, perhaps, it was not so much his talent. Omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico Tangit, et admissus circum præcordia ludit.

This was the commendation which Persius gave him: where, by vitium, he means those little vices which we call follies, the defects of human understanding, or, at most, the peccadillos of life, rather than the tragical vices, to which men are hurried by their un

ruly passions and exorbitant desires. But, in the word omne, which is universal, he concludes with me, that the divine wit of Horace left nothing untouched; that he entered into the inmost recesses of nature; found out the imperfections even of the most wise and grave, as well as of the common people; discovering, even in the great Trebatius, to whom he addresses the first Satire, his hunting after business, and following the court, as well as in the persecutor Crispinus, his impertinence and importunity. It is true, he exposes Crispinus openly, as a common nuisance; but he rallies the other, as a friend, more finely. The exhortations of Persius are confined to noblemen; and the stoick philosophy is that alone which he recommends to them; Juvenal exhorts to particular virtues, as they are opposed to those vices against which he declaims; but Horace laughs to shame all follies, and insinuates virtue, rather by familiar examples than by the severity of precepts.

This last consideration seems to incline the balance on the side of Horace, and to give him the preference to Juvenal, not only in profit, but in pleasure. But, after all, I must confess, that the delight which Horace gives me is but languishing. Be pleased still to understand, that I speak of my own taste only: he may ravish other men; but I am too stupid and insensible to be tickled. Where he barely grins himself, and, as Scaliger says, only shows his white teeth, he cannot provoke me to any laughter. His urbanity, that is, his good manners, are to be commended, but his wit is faint; and his salt, if I may dare to say so, almost insipid. Juvenal is of a more vigorous and masculine wit; he gives me as much pleasure as I can bear; he fully satisfies my expectation; he treats his subject home: his spleen is raised, and he raises mine: I have the pleasure of

concernment in all he says; he drives his reader along with him; and when he is at the end of his way, I willingly stop with him. If he went another stage, it would be too far; it would make a journey of a progress, and turn delight into fatigue. When he gives over, it is a sign the subject is exhausted, and the wit of man can carry it no farther. If a fault can be justly found in him, it is, that he is sometimes too luxuriant, too redundant; says more than he needs, like my friend the Plain-Dealer, but never more than pleases. Add to this, that his thoughts are as just as those of Horace, and much more elevated. His expressions are sonorous and more noble; his verse more numerous, and his words are suitable to his thoughts, sublime and lofty. All these contribute to the pleasure of the reader; and the greater the soul of him who reads, his transports are the greater. Horace is always on the amble, Juvenal on the gallop; but his way is perpetually on carpet-ground. He goes with more impetuosity than Horace, but as securely; and the swiftness adds a more lively agitation to the spirits. The low style of Horace is according to his subject, that is, generally grovelling. I question not but he could have raised it; for the first epistle of the second book, which he writes to Augustus, (a most instructive satire concerning poetry,) is of so much dignity in the words, and of so much elegancy in the numbers, that the author plainly shows, the sermo pedestris, in his other Satires, was rather his choice than his necessity. He was a rival to Lucilius, his predecessor, and was resolved to surpass him in his own manner. Lucilius, as we see by his remaining fragments, minded neither his

* Wycherley, author of the witty comedy so called,

style, nor his numbers, nor his purity of words, nor his run of verse. Horace therefore copes with him in that humble way of satire, writes under his own force, and carries a dead-weight, that he may match his competitor in the race. This, I imagine, was the chief reason why he minded only the clearness of his satire, and the cleanness of expression, without ascending to those heights to which his own vigour might have carried him. But, limiting his desires only to the conquest of Lucilius, he had his ends of his rival, who lived before him; but made way for a new conquest over himself, by Juvenal, his successor. He could not give an equal pleasure to his reader, because he used not equal instruments. The fault was in the tools, and not in the workman. But versification and numbers are the greatest pleasures of poetry: Virgil knew it, and practised both so happily, that, for aught I know, his greatest excellency is in his diction. In all other parts of poetry, he is faultless; but in this he placed his chief perfection. And give me leave, my lord, since I have here an apt occasion, to say, that Virgil could have written sharper satires than either Horace or Juvenal, if he would have employed his talent that way. I will produce a verse and half of his, in one of his Eclogues, to justify my opinion; and with commas after every word, to show, that he has given almost as many lashes as he has written syllables: it is against a bad poet, whose ill verses he describes :

non tu, in triviis, indocte, solebas

Stridenti, miserum, stipulâ, disperdere carmen?

But, to return to my purpose. When there is any thing deficient in numbers and sound, the reader is uneasy and unsatisfied; he wants something of his complement, desires somewhat which he finds not: and this being the manifest defect of Horace, it is

no wonder that, finding it supplied in Juvenal, we are more delighted with him. And, besides this, the sauce of Juvenal is more poignant, to create in us an appetite of reading him. The meat of Horace is more nourishing; but the cookery of Juvenal more exquisite: so that, granting Horace to be the more general philosopher, we cannot deny that Juvenal was the greater poet, I mean in satire. His thoughts are sharper; his indignation against vice is more vehement; his spirit has more of the commonwealth genius; he treats tyranny, and all the vices attending it, as they deserve, with the utmost rigour and consequently, a noble soul is better pleased with a zealous vindicator of Roman liberty, than with a temporising poet, a well-mannered court-slave, and a man who is often afraid of laughing in the right place; who is ever decent, because he is naturally servile. After all, Horace had the disadvantage of the times in which he lived; they were better for the man, but worse for the satirist. It is generally said, that those enormous vices. which were practised under the reign of Domitian, were unknown in the time of Augustus Cæsar; that therefore Juvenal had a larger field than HoLittle follies were out of doors, when oppression was to be scourged instead of avarice: it was no longer time to turn into ridicule the false opinions of philosophers, when the Roman liberty was to be asserted. There was more need of a Brutus in Domitian's days, to redeem or mend, than of a Horace, if he had then been living, to laugh at a fly-catcher. * This reflection at the same time ex

race.

The precise dates of Juvenal's birth and death are disputed; but it is certain he flourished under Domitian, famous for his cruelty against men and insects. Juvenal was banished by the ty

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