than those of a Wit. To laugh at Vice, and show Vice, what she is too ready to forget, that she has many points in common with the fool; to pluck Murder by the sleeve, and quiz him because he has forgotten to wipe the blood off his face; to laugh at Sin and Wickedness for eating peas with a knife,—is the kind of business that a merely worldly satirist has to perform. There are ages which demand a different kind of treatment; and here was one of them. Accordingly, in Juvenal there is a degree of earnestness and of purpose, and a heartiness of scorn, which are not the least attractions about that sturdy satirist, and underlie his coarse humour, and his fierce epithets, and his bitter laughter. He is a big, brawny fighting-man; and if his coat is clumsy, and his fist coarse, you must remember the " mills” he has been in. He was perpetually out in that grand ring, as the champion of old Rome-old Rome against the empire was his cause. I do not know that he made much by the fighting, personally, in his lifetime; probably he was too gallant a fellow to mind that. But he has won the fight in time. The essence of him is alive and triumphant; and his "belt" hangs up as a constellation in literature, like the belt of Orion in the firmament. There are many moral and literary differences between Horace and Juvenal: beneath them lies, as the main one, of course, the different sort of satiric Ꭰ impulse at bottom. Horace was scarcely ever angry; and he is a clear-seeing fine-minded man, with a talent for dramatic and personal exhibition of folly. He gives many fine examples of the absurdity of avarice, for example; of any of the extremes which mankind so inconsistently exhibit in every thing. Every thing has its ludicrous aspect; and that Horace lays hold of. He was a good-tempered man, a well-balanced man, of high taste and breeding; and how spiritedly will he expose,-I say expose, by making it appear in action, rather than denounce,absurdity, meanness, ostentation! He takes them, usually, in their relation to society. Society-the cultivated, observing, reflecting section-is his standard. If he attacks any thing as hateful, he shows its contrast to what a polished sensible person must think of it. In one excellent satire he introduces a Stoic, proving all the world almost mad; and a very good case he makes of it. He takes the old Greek heroes to task in the spirit of a man of the world, just as he would take a contemporary. "Son of Atreus, why do you deny burial to Ajax?" "I am a king." "Just so: plebeian as I am, I ask no further." The king permits him to proceed. He interrogates him again: "Why putrefies Ajax, the second hero of all the Greeks, that Priam and his people may exult?" "The madman killed a thousand sheep," goes on the monarch. "What! and you, when you determined to kill, instead of a calf, your sweet daughter at the altar at Aulis,-were you in your right mind?" Here, you see, is his point of view. All sense of the solemn and awful nature of the tradition, as an instance of dark early faith, is lost. The case is decided like any common case demanding the opinion of a shrewd practical fellow. Many a case of madness is brought forward by the Stoic (who thus represents, for the hour, Horace's satirical mood); but the satirist very characteristically makes his mouthpiece bear the brunt of the unbridled attack, and, with much facetiousness, prays for him, in exchange for his wisdom, "that the gods will endow him with a barber." -A cheerful humorous man, with all his satirical bias; and who was undoubtedly disposed not to be ferocious in his views of people, because he was conscious of a good disposition in himself in life, and inclined to be hopeful of others' intentions too. Many of Horace's pieces are, accordingly, sketches of life and manners, in which the satire is more incidental and casual than direct and determinate. But Juvenal has usually a most unmistakable intention to lash something and somebody. He gropes about, like the giant in the nursery-tale, with his "fee-fo-fum," smelling prey, and prepared to lay hold of it. He laughs and hates. He had abundant subjects to attack; and his point of view is the old Roman one. The nobility are degenerate, the people degraded, the emperors monsters; and scoundrels born slaves, bloated with wealth, are prominent in the general infamy. He sallies out against all; and his laugh and his abuse are so strong and so reckless, that they give one some notion of what such humour as that shouted out in the wake of the triumphal car must have been. It is a fact as certain as it sounds extraordinary, that the Romans used to have buffoons, or a buffoon, as part of the funeral ceremony. There are times when Juvenal's fun gives one a glimpse of such a portentous figure; a representative of the comic element present amidst the ghastliest and most painful spectacles. The common distinction drawn between these two great satirists is, that Horace was the master of ridicule, and Juvenal of invective; that ridicule is the more rare and delicate gift; and this once laid down, follows Horace's superiority. No doubt this is extremely convenient to people who wish to have a kind of memoria technica of criticism in their heads, so as to be able to give each author his epithet, and then leave him labelled- and neglected. This may be convenient. You remember Pope's lines in one of his imitations of Horace? 1 There was a functionary called the archimimus, who marched along representing the defunct person's doings and sayings. Suetonius has a good story about the one who officiated at the funeral of Vespasian,- Vesp. c. 19. "In all disputes where critics bear a part, Not one but nods, and talks of Jonson's art, But for the passions, Southern sure, and Rowe." These good old traditionary distinctions are, of course, founded on truth. But to understand any of these authors at all well, you would have to be much more minute; to determine the nature in Jonson, and the art in Shakspeare; while to say only that Cowley was noted for wit, would not serve to discriminate him from Swift or George Canning. If it be meant that Juvenal had not a singular talent for ridicule, had not brilliant and striking wit, -something is meant that is not true. The fact is, he is prickly all over with touches of ridicule. In the fourth satire he has given us what is an admirable specimen of it, in the form and style of the mock-heroic. The heroes here are Domitian and the senators. -With extreme gravity he begins, that it was in the days when the last of the Flavian family was lacerating the half-dead world, and Rome was serving a bald Nero, that a huge turbot came into the Adriatic. The fisherman who made the haul destined it at once to the High Pontiff; for, says our |