SATIRE II.

Argument.

THIS Satire contains an irregular but animated attack, upon the hypocrisy of philosophers and reformers; whose ignorance, profligacy, and impiety, it exposes with just severity.

Domitian is here the hero: his vices are covertly or openly alluded to under every different name; and it must give us a high opinion of the intrepid spirit of the man who could venture to produce and circulate, though but in private, so faithful a representation of that ferocious and blood-thirsty tyrant.

The difficulties in the way of translating this Satire, are scarcely to be conceived but by those who have made the experiment: if my success were but at all equal to my pains, I should dismiss it with some degree of confidence.

D

SATIRE II.

v. 1—10.

OH, I could flee, inflamed with just disdain,
To the bleak regions of the frozen main,
When from their lips the cant of virtue falls,
Who talk like Curii, live like Bacchanals!

Devoid of knowledge, as of worth, they thrust,
In every nook, some philosophick bust;
For he, among them, counts himself most wise,
Who most old sages of the sculptor buys;
Sets most true Zenos, most Cleanthes' heads,
To guard the volumes which he never reads!

VER. 4. Who talk like Curii, &c.] For the Curii, see Sat. 111. and XI.

VER. 9. Sets most true Zenos, most Cleanthes' heads, &c.] As those philosophers were celebrated above all others, for the shrewdness and subtilty of their disquisitions, there is a considerable degree of humour in our author's making his blockheads fix on their busts, for the purpose of ornamenting their libraries.

If we could suppose Lucian to have read Juvenal, (and he probably had,) he might have this passage in his thoughts, when he wrote his illiterate book-hunter, απαίδευτος και πολλα βιβλια ανεμενος. Locher, who translated Brandt's Ship of Fools, had undoubtedly both Juvenal and Lucian before him, when he gave the following version:

Spem quoque nec parvam collecta volumina præbent, "Calleo nec verbum, nec libri sentio mentem,

"Attamen in magno per me servantur honore."

TRUST NOT TO OUTWARD SHOw; in every street, Obscenity, in formal garb, we meet.

And dost thou, hypocrite, our lusts arraign,
Thou, of Socratick pathicks the mere drain!
Nature thy rough and shaggy limbs design'd,
To mark a stern, inexorable mind;

But all so smooth below!-the surgeon smiles,
"And scarcely can, for laughter, lance the piles."

For the rest; if another Brandt were to arise, and incline to furnish out a cargo of fools from the stock in hand, I much doubt whether the illiterate book-hunter" would not still be the first he would put on board.

VER. 14. Thou, of Socratick pathicks the mere drain !] This line has given offence to some of the criticks, who consider it as a wanton attack upon Socrates; while others, on the contrary, justify it from the alleged propensities of that philosopher. This is no place to enter into a vindication of his character, which I believe, and which every good man must delight to think, unspotted; nor, indeed, does Juvenal afford the least occasion for it. The opposite terms, Socraticos cinados, conveyed not, in his mind, the slightest censure; they are merely a continuation of the double image with which he began, and must evidently be referred to the Qui Curios simulant, &c. It is extraordinary that the mistake should be so general, since, whatever contempt our author might feel for the rabble of Greek philosophists, and however prone he may be to vary his language with his subject, he never mentions Socrates but with the highest respect. He quotes him as a pattern of moderation and virtue in the fourteenth Satire; and few of his readers have forgotten, I trust, that most beautiful designation of him in the address to Calvinus:

dulcique Senex vicinus Hymetto,

"Qui partem acceptæ sæva inter vincla cicuta
"Accusatori nollet dare."

But the misapprehension stops not here; it has induced those who thought well of Socrates, (and the learned Prideaux among the rest,) to suspect the integrity of the text, and alter Socraticos into Sotadicos! a most injudicious step; for Sotades was certainly no hypocrite: indeed, he appears, from Strabo, Athenæus, and Suidas, to have been so far from pretending to the character of a rigid moralist, (turpium castigator,) that he openly wrote of, and recommended, the most detestable vices.

Gravely demure, in wisdom's awful chair,
His beetling eyebrows longer than his hair,
In silent state, the affected Stoick sits,

And drops his maxims on the crowd by fits!-
Yon Peribomius, whose emaciate air,

And tottering gait, his rank disease declare,
With patience I can view; he braves disgrace,
Nor skulks behind a sanctimonious face:
Him may his folly, or his fate excuse,---
But whip me those, who Virtue's name abuse,
And, soil'd with all the vices of the times,
Thunder damnation on their neighbours' crimes!
Why should I shrink at Sextus? can I be,
Whate'er my infamy, more base than he?
Varillus cries: The man who treads aright,
May mock the halt, the swarthy Moor, the white;
This we allow; but Patience' self must fail,

To hear the Gracchi at sedition rail!

Who would not mingle earth, and sea, and sky,
Should Milo murder, Verres theft decry,
Clodius adultery? Catiline accuse
Cethegus, Lentulus, of factious views,

VER. 31. Why should I shrink at Sextus?] The immediate design of the Satire here opens upon us. Varillus, a beggarly debauchee, had been threatened by Sextus (a magistrate, it should seem) with the punishment due to a crime of which the latter was equally guilty. From this circumstance, Varillus takes occasion, first to claim impunity for himself, and then to expose the hypocrisy of his judge; which he aggravates by a number of examples, till the charge is artfully brought to bear with accumulated force on Domitian.

VER. 36. To hear the Gracchi, &c.] The history of the Gracchi is an important one; but too long to be given in this place. They