in which Lucretius is the poet of Epicureanism, as if there were equal scope for the exposition of a philosophy in a few scholastic exercises and in an elaborate didactic poem. On the other hand, it should be recollected that under the iron grasp of the Roman mind, Stoicism, as was just now remarked, was being reduced more and more to a simply practical system, bearing but a faint impress of those abstruse cosmological speculations which had so great a charm for the intellect of Greece even in its most sober moments, and exhibiting in place of them an applicability to civil life the want of which had been noted as a defect in the conceptions of Zeno and Chrysippus1. The library and the lectureroom still were more familiar to it than the forum or the senate; but the transition had begun and though Persius may have looked to his seven hundred volumes for his principles of action, as he did to Horace for information about the ways of the world, the only theory which he strove to inculcate was the knowledge which the founders of his sect, in common with Socrates, believed to be the sole groundwork of correct practice. Using the very words of Virgil, he calls upon a benighted race to acquaint itself with the causes of things: but the invitation is not to that study of the stars in their courses, of eclipses, and earthquakes and inundations, of the laws governing the length of days and nights, which enabled Lucretius to triumph over the fear of death, but to an inquiry into the purpose of man's being, the art of skilful driving in the chariotrace of life, the limits to a desire of wealth and to its expenditure on unselfish objects, and the ordained position of each individual in the social system. Such an apprehension of his subject would naturally lead him not to the treatise, but to the sermon-not to the didactic poem, but to the satire or moral epistle. But though the form of the composition is desultory, the spirit is in the main definite and consistent. Even in the first satire, in which he seems to drop the philosopher and assume the critic, we recognize the same belief in the connection between intellectual knowledge and practice, and consequently between a corrupt taste and a relaxed morality, which shines out so clearly afterwards when he tells the enfranchised slave that he cannot move a finger without committing a blunder, and that it is as portentous for a man to take part in life without study as it would be for a ploughman to attempt to bring a ship into port. It is true that he follows Horace closely, not only in his illustrations and descriptions of manners, but in his lessons of morality-a strange deference to the man who ridiculed Crispinus and Damasippus, and did not even spare the great Stertinius; but the evil and folly of avarice, the wisdom of contentment and self-control, and the

1 Cic. Leg. 3. 6.

duty of sincerity towards man and God, were doctrines at least as congenial to a Stoic as to an Epicurean, and the ambition with which the pupil is continually seeking to improve upon his master's felicity of expression shows itself more successfully in endeavours to give greater stringency to his rule of life and conduct. In one respect, certainly, we may wonder that he has failed to represent the views of that section of the Stoics with which he is reported to have lived on terms of familiar intercourse. There is no trace of that political feeling which might have been expected to appear in the writings of a youth who was brought into frequent contact with the revolutionary enthusiasm of Lucan, and may probably have been present at one of the banquets with which Thrasea and Helvidius used to celebrate the birthdays of the first and the last of the great republican worthies. The supposed allusions to the poetical character of Nero in the first satire shrink almost to nothing in the light of a searching criticism, while the tradition that in the original draught the emperor was directly satirized as Midas receives no countenance, to say the least, from the poem itself, the very point of which, so far as we can apprehend it, depends on the truth of the reading given in the MSS. The fourth satire does undoubtedly touch on statesmanship : but the tone throughout is that of a student, who in his eagerness to imitate Plato has apparently forgotten that he is himself living not under a popular but under an imperial government, and the moral intended to be conveyed is simply that the adviser of the public ought to possess some better qualification than those which were found in Alcibiades—a topic about as appropriate to the actual state of Rome as the schoolboy's exhortation to Sulla to lay down his power. Thus his language, where he does speak, enables us to interpret his silence as the silence not of acquiescence or even of timidity, though such times as his might well justify caution, but rather of unworldly innocence, satisfied with its own aspirations after moral perfection, and dreaming of Athenian licence under the very shade of despotism. On the other hand, it is perfectly intelligible that he should have seen little to admire in Seneca, many as are the coincidences which their common philosophy has produced in their respective writings. There could, indeed, have been but little sympathy between his simple earnestness and that rhetorical facility— that Spanish taste for inappropriate and meretricious ornament—that tolerant and compromising temper, able to live in a court while unable to live in exile, which, however compatible with real wisdom and virtue, must have seemed to a Stoic of a severer type only so many qualifications for effectually betraying the good cause. So, again, he does not seem to exhibit any anticipation of the distinctly human and religious development which, as we have seen, was the final phase

of Stoicism. His piety is simply the rational piety which would approve itself to any Roman moralist-the piety recommended by Horace, and afterwards by Juvenal-pronouncing purity of intent to be more acceptable in the sight of Heaven than costly sacrifice, and bidding men ask. of the gods such things only as divine beings would wish to grant. In like manner his humanity, though genial in its practical aspect, is still narrowed on the speculative side by the old sectarian exclusiveness which barred the path of life to every one not entering through the gate of philosophy. In short, he is a disciple of the earlier Stoicism of the empire a Roman in his predilection for the ethical part of his creed yet conforming in other respects to the primitive traditions of Greeceneither a patriot nor a courtier, but a recluse student, an ardent teacher of the truths which he had himself learnt, without the development which might have been generated by more mature thought, or the abatement which might have been forced upon him by a longer experience.

We have already observed that the character of Persius' opinions determined his choice of a poetical vehicle for expressing them. With his views it would have been as unnatural for him to have composed a didactic treatise, like Lucretius, or a republican epic, like Lucan, as to have rested satisfied with multiplying the productions of his own boyhood, tragedies and pilgrimages in verse. And now, what was the nature and what the historical antecedents of that form of composition which he adopted as most congenial to him?

The exploded derivation of satire from the Greek satyric drama is one of those not infrequent instances where a false etymology has preserved a significant truth. There seems every reason to believe that the first beginnings of satire among the Romans are parallel to the rudimental type from which dramatic entertainments were developed in Greece. When I am reading on these two subjects,' says Dryden, in his admirable essay on Satire, 'methinks I hear the same story told twice over with very little alteration.' The primitive Dionysiac festivals of the Greek rustic populations seem to have answered with sufficient exactness to the harvest-home rejoicings of agricultural Italy described by Horace, when the country wits encountered each other in Fescennine ImNor did the resemblance cease at this its earliest stage. provised repartee was succeeded by pantomimic representation and dancing to music, and in process of time the two elements, combined yet discriminated from each other, assumed the form of a regular play, with its alternate dialogues and cantica. Previous to this later development there had been an intermediate kind of entertainment called the satura or medley, either from the miscellaneous character of its matter, which appears to have made no pretence to a plot or story,

verses.

or from the variety of measures of which it was composed-a more professional and artistic exhibition than the Fescennine banteringmatches, but far removed from the organized completeness of even the earlier drama. It was on this narrow ground that the independence of the Roman genius was destined to assert itself. Whether from a wish to take advantage of the name, or to preserve a thing, once popular, from altogether dying out in the process of improvement, a feeling which we know to have operated in the case of the exodia or interludes introduced into the representation of the Atellane plays, Ennius was led to produce certain compositions which he called satires, seemingly as various both in character and in versification as the old dramatic medley, but intended not for acting but for reciting or reading—in other words, not plays but poems. All that we know of these is comprised in a few titles and a very few fragments, none of which tell us much, coupled with the fact that in one of them Life and Death were introduced contending with each other as two allegorical personages, like Fame in Virgil, as Quintilian remarks, or Virtue and Pleasure in the moral tale of Prodicus. Little as this is, it is more than is known of the satires of Pacuvius, of which we only hear that they resembled those of Ennius. What was the precise relation borne by either to the later Roman satire with which we are so familiar can but be conjectured. Horace, who is followed as usual by Persius, ignores them both as satirists, and claims the paternity of satire for Lucilius, who, as he says, imitated the old Attic comedy, changing merely the measure; nor does Quintilian mention them in the brief but celebrated passage in which he asserts the merit of the invention of satire to belong wholly to Rome. This silence may be taken as showing that neither Ennius nor Pacuvius gave any exclusive or decided prominence to that element of satire which in modern times has become its distinguishing characteristic― criticism on the men, manners, and things of the day; but it can scarcely impeach their credit as the first founders of a new and original school of composition. That which constitutes the vaunted originality of Roman satire is not so much its substance as its form: the one had already existed in perfection at Athens, the elaboration of the other was reserved for the poetic art of Italy. It is certainly not a little remarkable that the countrymen of Aristophanes and Menander should not have risen to the full conception of familiar compositions in verse in which the poet pours out desultory thoughts on contemporary subjects in his own person, relieved from the trammels which necessarily bind every dramatic production, however free and unbridled its spirit. That such a thing might easily have arisen among them is evident from the traditional fame of the Homeric Margites, itself

apparently combining one of the actual requisites of the Roman medley, the mixture of metres, with the biting invective of the later satire-a work which, when fixed at its latest date, must have been one of the concomitants, if not, as Aristotle thinks, the veritable parent, of the earlier comedy of Greece. In later times we find parallels to Roman satire in some of the idylls of Theocritus, not only in those light dialogues noticed by the critics, of which the Adoniazusae is the best instance, but in the poem entitled the Charites, where the poet complains of the general neglect into which his art has fallen in a strain of mingled pathos and sarcasm which may remind us of Juvenal's appeal in behalf of men of letters, the unfortunate fraternity of authors. But Greece was not ordained to excel in everything; and Rome had the opportunity of cultivating a virtually unbroken field of labour which was suited to her direct practical genius, and to her mastery over the arts of social life. There can be no question but that the conception of seizing the spirit of comedy-of the new comedy no less than the old-the comedy of manners as well as the comedy of scurrilous burlesque —and investing it with an easy undress clothing, the texture of which might be varied as the inward feeling changed, was a great advance in the progress of letters. It would seem to be a test of the lawful development of a new form of composition from an old, that the latter should be capable of including the earlier, as the larger includes the smaller. So in the development of the Shaksperian drama from the Greek the chorus is not lost either as a lyrical or as an ethical element, but is diffused over the play, no longer seen indeed, but felt in the art which heightens the tone of the poetry, and brings out the moral relations of the characters into more prominent relief. So in that great development which transcends as it embraces all others, the development of prose from poetry, the superiority of the new form to the old as a general vehicle of expression is shown in the expansive flexibility which can find measured and rhythmic utterance for the raptures of passion or imagination, yet give no undue elevation to the statement of the plainest matters of fact. And so it is in the generation of satire from comedy: the unwieldy framework of the drama is gone, but the dramatic power remains, and may be summoned up at any time at the pleasure of the poet, not only in the impalpable shape of remarks on human character, but in the flesh-and-blood fulness of actual dialogue such as engrosses several of the satires of Horace, and enters as a more or less important ingredient into every one of those of Persius. Or, if we choose to regard satire, as we are fully warranted in doing, in its relation not only to the stage but to other kinds of poetry, we shall have equal reason to admire it for its elasticity, as being capable of rising without