SATIRE I.

Argument.

DRYDEN will have this Satire to be the "natural ground-work of all the rest." * It rather seems, from several circumstances mentioned in it, to have been produced subsequently to most of them; and was probably drawn up after the Author had determined to collect and publish his works, as a kind of Introduction.

Even without this evidence, we might conclude it to be written late in life, and by a man habituated to composition. Juvenal could not say with Hall,

"Stay till my beard shall sweep my aged breast,
"Then shall I seem an awful Satirist."

He had reached that period; and deriving dignity from years, and intrepidity from conscious rectitude, he announces himself with a tone of authority, which we neither feel inclined to doubt, nor to withstand.

He breaks silence with an impassioned complaint of the clamorous importunity of bad writers, and a humorous resolution of retaliating upon them, by turning author himself! He then ridicules the frivolous taste of his contemporaries in the choice of their subjects, intimating his own determination to devote himself wholly to Satire; to which he declares, with all the warmth of virtuous indignation, he is driven by the vices of the age.

He now exposes the corruption of the men, the profligacy of the women, the luxury of courtiers, the baseness of informers and fortune-hunters, the treachery of guardians, and the peculation of the officers of the state. Kindling with his theme, he censures the general avidity for gaming, the servile rapacity of the mendicant patricians, the avarice and gluttony of the rich, and the miserable state of poverty and subjection in which they kept their followers and dependants. Finally, he makes some bitter reflections on the danger of satirizing living villainy, and concludes with a resolution to attack it, under the mask of departed names.

* Ruperti agrees with Dryden. Ceterum Satiram hanc esse primam omnium quas Juvenalis scripserit, cum ex primis, tum ex postremis ejus versibus probabile sit. Vol. ii. p. 5.—I do not think so, and have elsewhere given my reasons for it.

SATIRE I.

V. 1-8.

AND must I, while hoarse Codrus perseveres
To force his Theseid on my tortured ears,
Hear, ALWAYS hear, nor ONCE the debt repay!
Must this, unpunish'd, pour his comick lay,
His lyrick, that! huge Telephus, at will,
The livelong day consume, or, huger still,
Orestes closely written, written, too,

Down the broad marge, and yet—no end in view!

VER. 1. And must I, &c.] Before the invention of printing, authors had no shorter road to fame than publick rehearsals. To procure full audiences for these, they had recourse to interest, solicitations, and, in case they were rich enough, to bribes, and even to threats.-Ut Drusonem debitor æris, &c.

So Druso, when his debtors fail to pay
Their monthly interest, on the stated day,
Takes fearful vengeance: Ranged on either hand,
For execution, the sad captives stand,

Compell'd with outstretch'd neck, and list'ning ear,
His woful works, without a yawn, to hear!

Hor. Sut. lib. i. 3.

From this ludicrous picture of misery, it appears, that the practice had taken root at this early period; and, indeed, Horace, in a subsequent Satire, reckons it among the plagues of Rome:Auditum scripta, relictis Omnibus officiis. But the race' of scribblers was prodigiously multiplied in Juvenal's days, and the grievance of following their rehearsals more deeply felt. Pliny says, that he sacrificed months to them: our author, if we may judge from his manner, had sacrificed more. It is clear, however, from a very picturesque passage in Pliny, that the general listlessness

Away!-I know not my own house so well, As Ilia's sacred grove, and Vulcan's cell, Fast by the Æolian rocks! How the winds roar, How ghosts are tortured on the Stygian shore, How Jason stole the golden fleece, and how The Centaurs fought on Othrys' shaggy brow,

with which they were attended, was exceedingly great. After repeated invitations and delays, when the rehearser has now taken his station, and spread his book before him, and is on the point of beginning, "tum demum," says he, " ac tunc quoque lente, cunctanterque veniunt, nec tamen permanent, sed ante finem recedunt; alii dissimulanter et furtim, alii simpliciter et libere!" Ep, xiii.

lib. 1.

Holyday supposes Codrus to be the person who is mentioned again in the third Satire; and of whose goods and chattels so curious an inventory is there given. It may be so; and yet the valuables enumerated, would rather seem to have been collected by an antiquary, than a poet. Holyday adds, that "he had nothing of the poet but the poverty :" he might, at least, have thrown in the pertinacity. . What else he had cannot now be known, as his works are lost. The old Scholiast tells us, that the Theseid (which so happily provoked our author to retaliate) was a tragedy: it was more probably an epick poem. The authors of Telephus and Orestes have escaped the edge of ridicule; they are nowhere mentioned.

VER. 9. Away!—I know not my own house &c.] Hall has imi tated this passage with some humour:

"No man his threshold better knows, than I,
،، Brute's first arrival, and his victory,

،، St. George's sorrel, and his cross of blood,
"Arthur's round board, or Caledonian wood;
"But so to fill up books, both back and side,
"What boots it?" &c.

We have here a summary of the subjects which usually employed the wits of Rome; and certainly they could not be much more interesting to the readers of those times, than they are to us. Martial seems to have thought as meanly of them as our author; and in two very excellent epigrams, asserts the superiour usefulness of his own compositions. You mistake, says he, when you call my works trifles; the Supper of Tereus, the Flight of Dedalus, &c. &c. these are trifles: what I write "comes home to men's business and bosoms;"-et HOMINEM pagina nostra sapit..

The walks of Fronto echo round and round,
The columns trembling with the eternal sound,
While high and low, as the mad fit invades,
Bellow the same trite nonsense through the shades.
I TOO CAN WRITE, and, at a pedant's frown,
ONCE pour'd my fustian rhetorick on the town,
And idly proved that Sylla, far from power,
Had pass'd, unknown to fear, the tranquil hour:-
Now I resume my pen; for since we meet
Such swarms of desperate bards in every street,
'Twere vicious clemency to spare the oil,
And hapless paper, they are sure to spoil.
But why I choose, adventurous, to retrace
The Auruncan's route, and in the arduous race

The expedition to fetch, or, as Juvenal will have it, to steal, the golden fleece, is a manifest allusion to the Argonautics of Valerius Flaccus. The poem is by no means a bad one; and yet he sneers at it again in this very Satire: but it was the triteness of the story which provoked his ridicule; to which, perhaps, may be added some little prejudice against the author, for his flattery of the Flavian family-a family which Juvenal hated; and, to use an expression of Dr. Johnson, he was a good hater!

VER. 15. The walks of Fronto, &c.] Juvenal returns to the charge. The unhappy men who could not procure a house for their audience, or an audience for their rehearsals, haunted the baths, forums, porticos, and other places of general resort, in order to fasten on the loiterers, and thus obtain a hearing. For this, no place was better adapted than the house and gardens of Fronto, (a nobleman of great learning and virtue,) which were always open to the publick, and exceedingly frequented.

The picture in the original is excellent: nor can the imagination easily conceive a more ludicrous scene, than the little groups collected by the eager poets, in various parts of the garden, and compelled to listen to the ravings which burst the pillars, and shook the statues from their pedestals.

VER. 27. But why I choose, adventurous, to retrace

The Auruncan's route, &c.] Juvenal means Lucilius, who was born at Aurunca, a town in Campania. Horace calls