looked on the national beliefs as mere stuff for fancypictures: but, any way, these pictures are of high value to us; and it would be difficult to overrate the influence, at all times, of extreme good sense and social wisdom (such as abound in his Satires and Epistles) on the civilisation and culture of mankind.

When I call him worldly, therefore, I use it only as a term of description, and intend no offence to the memory of the grand little man, whose writings have helped to civilise the world, and largely aided in emancipating us from noxious and asinine superstitions, when they were first circulated at the revival of learning.

It is extremely difficult to give a notion of the literary charm of his Satires. As he says himself, ridicule cuts often more deeply than fierceness. I do not call him a bitter man. Much of his satire is just pleasantry. When, for instance, he gives us a sketch of the absurd supper of a parvenu, drawing the pompous, ill-bred, over-gorged Nasidienus,1 we laugh good-naturedly. The fellow swaggers and chuckles over every item of his own feast to the men he is entertaining; insinuates with extreme good taste, to begin with, that the sanglier is quite sound; and when the wine is brought in by a dusky Indian (for of course he must have an Indian, as 1 Sat. lib. ii. 8.

it was the mode), he turns to the greatest man he has managed to secure, and says, "Cæcuban, Mæcenas?-but we have Alban and Falernian, if you prefer them!" He harangues on his dishes, to prove that all is perfectly comme il faut; and turns palpably paler, when two of the young fellows, in sheer boredom, set in for severe drinking. Nothing can be more dramatic than the way in which Horace puts it before you: but for all that, would he have scorned Nasidienus? I dare say he would have dined with him with the utmost complacency, and was probably present at this very feast. He acquired that knowledge of Roman life by going about in society; and he shows a copious knowledge of cookery.

His Songs would give you a notion that he indulged in a romantic sort of dissipation. This arises from their not being rightly viewed as fancy-pictures-pictures on the ivory of the Latin language, -of old Lesbian life, and Ionian life, farther south, and long before. To me Horace seems a far homelier, simpler old gentleman than the classical conventionalists would have you suppose. A little, stoutish, weak-eyed, satirical, middle-aged man, sittingwith what hair he had left, smeared with Syrian ointment-crowned, under a vine, drinking, in company of a Greek young woman, with an ivy crown on her head, playing or dancing,—is to me a ludicrous ob

ject. I do not think that the simple and philosophic Horatius, with his eye for satire, was much given to this mode of enjoyment. I am pretty sure that he did enjoy himself; but I rather fancy him eating a too luxurious dinner now and then, cramming himself with tunny-fish, muscles, oysters, hare, thrushes, peacock, and whatever else was going; and atoning for it by much quiet and a little rustication in his farm. I am certain that he was, in the main, a homely little man; and that the finish and elegance he shows in his writings did not appear so conspicuously in his person and in the objects about him.

Of the life of Juvenal we know next to nothing. But he, too, has stamped his own character on his works; and perhaps it will be better now to bring him into the field, that we may look at the two great satirists together, and illustrate our theme by comparing and contrasting them. Let us place by the side of the philosophic man of the court of Augustus a darker and sterner figure, one who had seen every thing that Horace saw-corrupt-ripened into sheer abomination; and who has left us his protest against Rome the sinner in lines of blood and fire.

We hear that Juvenal followed the profession of an advocate; that he read his satires to audiences; that he was exiled under pretence of an honourablé

employment; and that he ended his life, heart-sick, far up the Nile. This may or may not be true. A late editor of note determines his career within the periods of the 42d year after Christ and the 122d year. This makes his birth just half a century posterior to Horace's death. He was thus a youth under Nero; had seen probably the miserable Vitellius dragged, gasping from fat and terror, out of his palace, with hands fastened behind him, to be murdered;3 had undoubtedly been a spectator of the career of Domitian. Well, here was a good school for a satirical writer! He lived with wide-open eyes, a man of real satirical genius, in a period precisely requiring a satirical man. Accordingly, his sixteen satires have, in all ages, been the objects of high admiration, not only for their qualities as satirical

1 This is the common old narrative which goes under the name of Suetonius. The story of Juvenal's death, as there represented, seems generally exploded now ;-and Juvenal is a writer who has been much elucidated within the last quarter of a century. We must rest contented with knowing that he was come to man's estate during Domitian's reign (A.D. 81-96), and that he probably survived to Hadrian's (A.D. 117-138). He was generally read, till lately, in the edition of Ruperti, which first appeared in 1800. The recent interpretations of difficulties will be found in the unpretending and excellent Thirteen Satires by Mayor (Cambridge, 1853), which I had not seen when I wrote this lecture.

2 Heinrich. See also Professor Ramsay's art. "Juvenal" in Smith's Dict. of Biog.

3 A scene described with incomparable power by Tacitus, Hist. lib. iii. c. 84, 85.

poems, but for the insight they give us into the Roman life under the empire.

It was a monstrous and unnatural period, that in which Juvenal lived,—of gigantic opulence and titanic sin; a time both of blood and luxury; when the world ate and drank more, and lied and blasphemed more, and was at once more knowing and more superstitious than it has ever been known to be. Something tropical is the effect that entering into it produces on the imagination which still retains any healthy northern simplicity of character. You gasp for air. The soul is in an atmosphere close and hot; cloudy with coarse perfume; where the flowers and the vegetation have, with monstrous proportions, something glaring and ghastly in their beauty, and something sickly in their breath. Foul figures of every land swarm round you: brawny murderers from the Danube, and dusky greasy scoundrels from the Nile. All that is bad is near. There are sounds of revelry, which are allied with unutterable shame. The clashing of cymbals and the notes of lutes, the gleam of gold and of wine, do not charm here; they terrify. The smoke of the wicked feasts blots out the heaven above you, and, like the drifting smoke from a funeral pile, is heavy with the odours of death.

This was a scene worthy of qualities much higher