the author, by an easy kind of punishment, into Egypt with a military command. To remove onem dicta interpretabatur Hadrianus. Inde exilii causa. Scripsit ergo in exilio Sat. xv. Sed cum nuper Consulem Junium" fuisse dicat, ante annum ad minimum cxx. scribere illam non potuit Juv. Nec vero postea scripsisse, exinde colligimus, quod "intra brevissimum tempus" perierit. 164. Such is the manner in which Dodwell accommodates Suetonius to his own ideas: which seem also to have been those of a much higher name, Salmasius; and, while I am now writing, to be sanctioned by the adoption of the learned Ruperti. I never affected singularity; yet I find myself constrained to differ from them all but I will state my reasons. In his 7th Satire, after speaking of Quintilian, Juvenal adds, 66 "Si fortuna volet, fies de rhetore consul: "Si volet hæc eadem fies de consule rhetor." Which, taking it for a proverbial expression, I have loosely rendered, Fortune can make kings of pedants, and pedants of kings. Dodwell, however, understands it literally. Hac sane cum Quintiliani causa dical, vix est quin Q. talem ostendant è rhctore nimirum nobilem, senatorium, consularem," et quidem illis divitiis instructum, quæ essent etiam ad censum senatorium necessariæ. 152. Now as Pliny, who probably died before Trajan, observes that Quintilian was a man of moderate fortune, it follows that he must have acquired the wealth and honours of which Juvenal speaks, days, and seems but little suited to his worst. He was at least eighty-one, they say, when he wrote it, yet it begins→→ "Me pavidum excipiet tyronem porta secundo Surely, at this age, the writer resembled Priam, the tremulus miles, more than the timid tyro! Nor do I believe that Juvenal would have been much inclined to amuse himself with the fancied advantages of a profession to which he was so unworthily driven. But the satire must have been as ill-timed for the army as for himself, since it was probably, at this period, in a better state of subjection than it had been for many reigns. I suppose it to be written, in professed imitation of our author's manner, about the age of Commodus. It has considerable merit, though the first and last paragraphs are feeble and tautological; and the execution of the whole is much inferiour to the design. such a man from his court, must, undoubtedly have been desirable to Domitian; and, as he at a later period. Dodwell fixes this to the time when Hadrian entered Rome CXVIII. which he states to be also that of the author's banishment. It must be confessed, that Juvenal lost no time in exerting himself: he had remained silent fourscore years; he now bursts forth at once, as Dodwell expresses it, recites all his Satires without intermission, (unis continuisque recitationibus,) celebrates Quintilian, attacks the Emperour, and is immediately despatched to Egypt! 162. Here is a great deal of business crowded into the compass 'of a few weeks, or, perhaps, days;— but let us examine it a little more closely Rigaltius, with several of the commentators, sees in the lines above quoted a sneer at Quintilian, and he accounts for the rhetor's silence respecting our author, by the resentment which he supposes him to have felt at it. As this militates strongly against Dodweil's ideas, he will not allow that any thing severe was intended by the passage in question; and adds that Quintilian could not mention Juvenal as a satirist, because he had not then written any satires. 160. I believe that both are wrong. In speaking of the satirists, Quintilian says that Persius had justly acquired no inconsiderable degree of reputation by the little he had written. Lib. x. c. 1. He then adds, sunt clari hodieque et qui olim nominabuntur. There are yet some excellent ones, some who will be better known hereafter. It always appeared to me, that this last phrase alluded to our author, with whose extraordinary merits Quintilian was probably acquainted, but whom he did not choose, or, perhaps, did not dare to mention in a work composed under a prince whose crimes this unnamed satirist persecuted with a severity as unmitigated as it was just. Quintilian had no political courage. Either from a sense of kindness or fear, he flatters Domitian almost as grossly as Martial :-but his life was a life of innocence and integrity I will therefore say no more on this subject; but leave it to the reader to consider whether such a man was likely to startle the god of his idolatry" by celebrating the Satires of Juvenal. Nor do agree with the commentators whom Dodwell has followed, in the literal interpretation of those famous lines. Unde igitur tot, &c. Sat. vII. v. 188-194. Quintilian was rich, when the rest of his profession were in the extremes of want. Here then was an instance of good fortune. He was lucky; and, with luck, a man may be any thing; handsome, and witty, and wise, and noble, and high-born, and a member of the senate. Who does not see in this a satirical exaggeration? Wisdom, beauty, с was spoken of with kindness in the same Satire, which is intirely free from political allusions, the and high birth, luck cannot give: why then should the remainder of this passage be so strictly interpreted, and referred to the actual history of Quintilian? The lines, Si fortuna volet, &c. are still more lax: a reflection thrown out at random, and expressing the greatest possible extremes of fortune. Yet on these authorities principally (for the passage of Ausonius, * written more than two centuries later, is of no great weight) has Quintilian been advanced to consular honours; while Dodwell, who, as we have seen, has taken immense pains to prove that they could only be conferred on him by Hadrian, has hence deduced his strongest arguments for the late date of our author's Satires; which he thus brings down to the period of mental imbecility! Hence, too, he accounts for the different ideas of Quintilian's wealth in Juvenal and Pliny. When the latter wrote, he thinks Quintilian had not acquired much property, he was "modicus facultatibus:" when the former," he had been enriched by the imperial bounty, and was capable of senatorial honours." Yet Pliny might not think his old master rich enough to give a fortune with his daughter he Q. consularia per Clementem ornamenta sortitus, honestamenta potius videtur quam insignia potestatis habuisse. In gratiar. act. Quintilian, then, was not actually consul: but this is no great matter-it is of more consequence to ascertain the Clemens by whom he was so honoured. In the preface to his fourth book, says, Cum vero mihi Dom. Augustus sororis suæ nepotum delegavit curam, &c. Vespasian had a daughter, Domatilla, who married, and died long before her father: she left a daughter, who was given to Flavius Clemens, by whom she had two sons. These were the grandchildren of Domitian's sister, of whom Quintilian speaks; and to their father, Clemens, according to Ausonius, he was indebted for the show, though not the reality, of power. There is nothing incongruous in all this; yet so possessed are Dodwell and his numerous followers (among whom I am sorry to rank Dusaulx) of the late period at which it happened, that they will needs have Hadrian to be meant by Domitianus Augustus, though the detestable flattery which follows the words I have quoted, most indisputably proves it to be Domitian; and though Dodwell himself is forced to confess that he can find no Clemens under Hadrian to whom the passage applies: Quis autem fuerit Clemens ille qui Q. ornamenta illa sub Hadriano impetraverit, me sane fateor ignorare! 165. "facetiousness" of the punishment (though Domitian's was not a facetious reign) renders the fact not altogether improbable. Yet, when we consider that these reflections on Paris could scarcely have been published before LXXXIV. and that the favourite was disgraced and put to death almost immediately after, we shall be inclined to doubt whether his banishment actually took place; or, if it did, whether it was of any long adequate to the expectations of a man of considerable rank, (Lib. vi. 32.) though Juvenal, writing at the same instant, might term him wealthy, in comparison of the rhetoricians who were starving around him; and count him a peculiar favourite of fortune. Let us bear in mind, too, that Juvenal is a satirist, and a poet in the latter capacity, the minute accuracy of an annalist cannot be expected at his hands; and in the former-as his object was to show the general discouragement of literature, he could not, consistently with his plan, attribute the solitary good fortune of Quintilian to any thing but luck. But why was Quintilian made consul? Because, replies Dodwell (164), when Hadrian first entered Rome, he was desirous of gaining the affections of the people; which could be done no way so effectually as by conciliating the esteem of the literati; and he therefore conferred this extraordinary mark of favour on the rhetorician. How did it escape this learned man, that he was likely to do himself more injury in their opinion by the banishment of Juvenal at that same instant? an old man of fourscore, who, by his own testimony, had spoken of him with kindness, in a poem which did more honour to his reign than any thing produced in it! and whose only crime was an allusion to the influence of a favourite player!—Indeed, the informers of Hadrian's reign must have had more sagacious noses than those of Domitian's, to smell out his fault. What Statius, in his time, was celebrated for the recitation of a Thebaid, or what Paris, for the purchase of an untouched Agave? And where, might we ask Dodwell, was the "jest" of sending a man on the verge of the grave, in a military capacity, into Egypt? Could the most supple of Hadrian's courtiers look on it as any thing but a wanton exercise of cruelty? At eighty, the business of satirizing, either in prose or verse, is nearly over what had the Emperour then to fear? And to sum up all, in a word, can any rational being seriously persuade himself that the Satires of Juvenal were produced, for the first time, by a man turned of fourscore! duration. That Juvenal was in Egypt is certain? but he might have gone there from motives of personal safety, or, as Salmasius has it, of curiosity. However this may be, it does not appear that he was ever long absent from Rome, where a thousand internal marks clearly show that all his Satires were written. But whatever punishment might have followed the complaint of Paris,* it had no other effect on our author, than that of increasing his hatred of tyranny, and turning his indignation upon the Emperour himself, whose hypocrisy, cruelty, and licentiousness, became, from that period, the object of his keenest reprobation. He profited, indeed, so far by his danger or his punishment, as to recite no more in publick; but he continued to write during the remainder of Domitian's reign, in which he finished, as I conceive, his second, third, fifth, But why should he complain at all? Was he ashamed of being known to possess an influence at the imperial court? Those were not very modest times, nor is modesty, in general, the crying vice of the quality." He was more likely to have gloried in it. If Bareas, or Camerinus, or any of the old nobility, had complained of the author, I should have thought it more reasonable :—but Domitian cared nearly as little for them as Paris himself did. + I hold, in opposition to the commentators, that Juvenal was known in Domitian's time, not only as a poet, but as a keen and vigorous satirist. He himself, though he did not choose to commit his safety to a promiscuous audience, appears to make no great secret of his peculiar talents. In this Satire, certainly prior to many of the others, he tells us that he accompanied Umbritius, then on his way to Cumæ, out of the gates of Rome. Umbritius predicted, as Tacitus says, the death of Galba, at which time he was looked upon as the most skilful aruspex of the age. He could not then be a young man ; yet, at quitting the capital, he still talks of himself as in the first stage of old age, nova canities, et prima et recta senectus. His voluntary exile, therefore, could not possibly have taken place long after the commencement of Domitian's reign; when he speaks of Juvenal as already celebrated for his |