prototype, the cause must not be sought in any desire to spare what he so evidently condemned. But he was thrown "on evil times;" he was, besides, of a rank distinguished enough to make his freedom dangerous, and of an age, when life had yet lost little of its novelty; to write, therefore, even as he has written, proves him to be a person of very singular courage and virtue. In the interval between Horace and Persius, despotism had changed its nature: the chains which the policy of Augustus concealed in flowers, were now displayed in all their hideousness. The arts were neglected, literature of every kind discouraged, or disgraced, and terrour and suspicion substituted in the place of the former ease and security. Stoicism, which Cicero accuses of having infected poetry, even in his days, and of which the professors, as Quintilian observes, always disregarded the graces and elegancies of composition, spread with amazing rapidity.* In this school Persius was educated, under the care of one of its most learned and respectable masters. Satire was not his first pursuit: indeed, he seems to have somewhat mistaken his talents when he applied to it. The true end of this species of writing, as Dusaulx justly says, is the improvement of society; but for this, much knowledge of * Dusaulx accounts for this by the general consternation. Most of those, he says, distinguished for talents or rank, took refuge in the school of Zeno; not so much to learn in it how to live, as how to die. I think, on the contrary, that this would rather have driven them into the arms of Epicurus. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," will generally be found, I believe, to be the maxim of dangerous times. It would not be difficult to show, if this were the place for it, that the prevalency of Stoicism was due to the increase of profligacy, for which it furnished a convenient cloak. This, however, does not apply to Persius. mankind (quicquid agunt homines) is previously necessary. Whoever is deficient in that, may be an excellent moral and philosophical poet; but cannot with propriety, lay claim to the honours of a satirist. And Persius was moral and philosophical in a high degree: he was also a poet of no mean order. But while he grew pale over the page of Zeno, and Cleanthes, and Chrysippus; while he imbibed, with all the ardour of a youthful mind, the paradoxes of those great masters, together with their principles, the foundations of civil society were crumbling around him, and soliciting his attention in vain. To judge from what he has left us, it might almost be affirmed that he was a stranger in his own country. The degradation of Rome was now complete; yet he felt, at least he expresses, no indignation at the means by which it was effected a sanguinary buffoon was lording it over the prostrate world; yet he continued to waste his most elaborate efforts on the miserable pretensions of pedants in prose and verse! If this savour of the impassibility of Stoicism, it is intitled to no great praise on the score of outraged humanity, which has stronger claims on a well regulated mind, than criticism, or even philosophy. Dryden gives that praise to the dogmas of Persius, which he denies to his poetry. His verse,' he says," is scabrous and hobbling, and his measures beneath those of Horace." This is too severe; for Persius has many exquisite passages, which nothing in Horace will be found to equal or approach. The charge of obscurity, has been urged against him with more justice; though this, perhaps, is not so great as it is usually represented. Casaubon could, without question, have defended him more successfully than he has done; but he was overawed by the brutal violence of the elder Scaliger: for I can scarcely persuade myself that he really believed this obscurity to be owing to "the fear of Nero, or the advice of Cornutus." The cause of it should be rather sought in his natural disposition, and in his habits of thinking. Generally speaking, however, it springs from a too frequent use of tropes, approaching in almost every instance to a catachresis, an anxiety of compression, and a quick and unexpected transition from one overstrained figure to another. After all, with the exception of the sixth Satire, which, from its abruptness, does not appear to have received the author's last touches, I do not think there is much to confound an attentive reader: some acquaintance, indeed, with the porch braccatis illita Medis, is previously necessary. His life may be contemplated with unabated pleasure: the virtue he recommends, he practised in the fullest extent; and at an age when few have acquired a determinate character, he left behind him an esta-blished reputation for genius, learning, and worth. JUVENAL wrote at a period still more detestable than that of Persius. Domitian, who now governed the empire, seems to have inherited the bad qualities of all his predecessors. Tiberius was not more hypocritical, nor Caligula more bloody, nor Claudius more sottish, nor Nero more mischievous, than this ferocious despot; who, as Theodorus Gadareus indignantly declared of Tiberius, was truly πηλον αιματι πεφυραμενον, a lump of clay kneaded up with blood! а Juvenal, like Persius, professes to follow Lucilius; but what was in one a simple attempt, is in the other a real imitation, of his manner.* Fluent I believe that Juveual meant to describe himself in the folowing spirited picture of Lucilius: and witty as Horace, grave and sublime as Persius; of a more decided character than the former, better acquainted with mankind than the latter, he did not confine himself to the mode of regulating an intercourse with the great, or to abstract disquisitions on the nature of scholastick liberty; but, disregarding the claims of a vain urbanity, and fixing all his soul on the eternal distinctions of moral good and evil, he laboured, with a magnificence of language peculiar to himself, to set forth the loveliness of virtue, and the deformity and horrour of vice, in full and perfect display. Dusaulx, who is somewhat prejudiced against Horace, does ample justice to Juvenal. There is great force in what he says; and, as I do not know that it ever appeared in English, I shall take the liberty of laying a part of it before the reader, at the hazard of a few repetitions. "The bloody revolution which smothered the last sighs of liberty,* had not yet found time to debase the minds of a people, amongst whom the traditionary remains of the old manners still subsisted. The cruel but politick Octavius scattered flowers over the paths he was secretly tracing towards despotism: the arts of Greece, transplanted "Ense velut stricto quoties Lucilius ardens * This is an errour which has been so often repeated, that it is believed. What liberty was destroyed by the usurpation of Augustus? For more than half a century, Rome had been a prey to ambitious chiefs, while five or six civil wars, each more bioocy than the other, had successively delivered up the franchises of the empire to the conquerour of the day. The Gracchi first opened the career to ambition, and wanted nothing but the means of corruption, which the East afterwards supplied, to effect what Marius, Sylla, and the two triumvirates brought about with sufficient ease. to the Capitol, flourished beneath his auspices; and the remembrance of so many civil dissensions, succeeding each other with increasing rapidity, excited a degree of reverence for the author of this unprecedented tranquillity. The Romans felicitated themselves, at not lying down, as before, with an apprehension of finding themselves included, when they awoke, in the list of proscription: and neglected, amidst the amusements of the Circus and Amphitheatre, those civil rights of which their fathers had been so jealous. "Profiting of these circumstances, Horace forgot that he had combated on the side of liberty. A better courtier than a soldier, he clearly saw how far the refinement, the graces, and the cultivated state of his genius (qualities not much considered or regarded till his time") were capable of advancing him, without any extraordinary effort. "Indifferent to the future, and not daring to recall the past, he thought of nothing but securing himself from all that could sadden the mind, and disturb the system which he had skilfully arranged on the credit of those then in power. It is on this account, that, of all his contemporaries, he has celebrated none but the friends of his master, or, at least, those whom he could praise without fear of compromising his favour. "In what I have said of Horace my chief design has been to show that this Proteus, who counted among his friends and admirers even those This is a very strange observation. It looks as if Dusaulx had leaped from the times of old Metellus, to those of Augustus, without casting a glance at the interval. The chef-d'œuvres of Roman literature were in every hand, when he supposed them to be neglected and, indeed, if Horace had left us nothing, the qualities of which Dusaulx speaks, might still be found in many works produced before he was known. |