and that Juvenal was indulging in a rather flat mystification, when he introduced an imaginary Mentor to warn him of the danger of denouncing Tigellinus, and propitiates his phantom monitor by a promise only to attack the dead. For if Tigellinus is merely the disguise of another reigning favourite, it would be necessary to prove, in the first place, that Trajan had a favourite who had power to persecute; and impossible to prove, in the second place, that any danger of the kind, which may have existed, could be avoided by only admitting names whose owners had departed; for Tigellinus had been dead nearly forty years; and the warning implies that his name was a transparent pseudonym for some well-known character, whom Juvenal's public were certain to recognize as the evil genius of Trajan. If we suppose that the real Tigellinus was meant, the allusion to Crispinus, in v. 27, is no objection to the theory that most of the satire was written under Nero, who raised Crispinus to the Senate, according to Probus, though his fortune culminated under Domitian.

The date of the Eighth Satire is yet more ambiguous. Besides the allusions already discussed to the Euphrates and the eagles which control the Batavian, we read (167-171) how Lateranus goes to drink in the tavern and feed with its greasy napkins, though he is of age for the wars of Armenia and Syria, for the defence of the river Danube and the river Rhine; old enough, in fact, to guarantee the security of Nero. Further on, at v. 193, the author speaks of his contemporaries as selling themselves to the stage and the arena, without a Nero to compel them; and at v. 221, we are informed that the musical tastes of Nero were the worst atrocity which called for the righteous vengeance of Vindex and Galba. Of course these last lines must have been written after Nero's death; and they explain the ambiguity of v. 198, where citharaedo principe, &c. must mean after an emperor had taken to music; what wonder that the nobility took to pantomime? for nullo cogente Nerone must be taken as a proof that the shameful devotion of men of rank to the stage was an effect which had

survived its cause. Some old copyists seem to have felt citharaedo principe as a difficulty after Nero's death; hence the gloss natus, which has replaced mimus in most MSS. It remains to explain the allusion to Lateranus, as of age to defend Nero, and the address to Rubellius Plautus or Blandus. In the first place, we may observe that the general and shameless relaxation of manners suits better with the age of Nero than with that of Domitian, the reviver of the censorship; in the second place, Lateranus must obviously be a contemporary of Nero; in the third place, it is exceedingly improbable that the younger Blandus (if there ever was one) could be the child of an imperial mother; because if Plautus, like his father, had married into the imperial family, Tacitus would have mentioned it as an additional reason for the jealousy of Nero; and it is not likely that Juvenal would have confounded Plautus with his son. It would be less violent to suppose that Juvenal wrote Plaute under Nero, having taken offence at the seclusion, which Tacitus and his class admired, and afterwards, when preparing his satires for publication, decided on altering an obsolete apostrophe, but forgot to change the circumstances. when he altered the name. If this hypothesis seems complicated, it must be remembered that all the MSS. have Blande or Plance, while Plaute rests only on the high authority of Lipsius; that the hero of the second Dunciad, in addition to his own sins, has to endure much inappropriate invective due to the peculiar dulness of the hero of the first; and that what was possible to Pope in an elaborate work, was not impossible to Juvenal in a passing digression.

One piece of evidence still remains for notice,—the allusions in Martial to a Juvenal with whom he lived on terms of affectionate familiarity at Rome, when he published his Seventh Book (where the twenty-fourth epigram is addressed to Juvenal, and the ninety-first alludes to him), and who was still presumably at Rome as a restless suitor for preferment in the beginning of Trajan's reign, while Martial, having given up the struggle, was enjoying the repose of his native Bilbilis

(Mart. XII. 18. 1). As none of these epigrams contain any allusion to our Juvenal's career as a satirist, as the gentlemanly mendicancy implied in the latest epigram is incompatible with the statement of the biographers that he could go on with the study of declamation for amusement till middle life, and with his own allusions to a modest competence, and as Juvenal himself says nothing of Martial, I am inclined to believe that there were two Juvenals who lived at Rome in the time of Martial.

On the whole, therefore, it is not impossible that Juvenal was born about 20 or 30 A. D., and lived into Trajan's reign, which would make him seventy or eighty years old at the condemnation of Marius Priscus,—the one date we are able to fix with confidence in the whole of Juvenal's life. He began to write in the last years of Nero, and probably had prepared most of the materials which he finally placed in the First and Eighth Satires, and the rough draughts of others, before he published the little jeu d'esprit on the actor Paris. Perhaps. also it would follow that the comparative repose and elevation of Satires X.-XIV. are due rather to the tranquillising influence of the reigns of Vespasian and Titus than to the mellowing influence of advancing years. Before A.D. 84, he had poems enough completed to be published, with the enlarged version of Satire VII., now pointed against the favourite of Domitian, who had just been sacrificed to the jealousy of his master. In that year he was banished to Egypt, probably for six months, and there witnessed the savage outbreak of fanaticism which is recorded in the Fifteenth Satire. He returned to Rome in a state of suppressed indignation against the tyrant who had appropriated a doubtful compliment to a fallen favourite as a reflection on his own good government, while he had entirely disregarded the decorous homage to himself, with which the satire opens. He was able to take a full revenge after Domitian's death, by the publication of the Fourth Satire in its present form. The additions, on this hypothesis, must be taken as a proof that, like Landor, Juvenal retained his energy as

well as his malice late; for he must have been nearly seventy, and may have been nearly eighty when Domitian died. His own death, if he began to write in middle life under Nero, must be placed early in Trajan's reign, and this would account for the remarkable absence of all distinct allusion to Trajan's victories, which would have been quite in place in the Eighth Satire, or in the Fourteenth, where, on the contrary, he implies (v. 193) that frontier hostilities of the most paltry kind afford the only chance of military distinction. Nor is it likely that he undertook any fresh satire under Trajan, except perhaps. the Sixteenth, which would suit very well with a time when a little military insolence was the most serious evil which a satirist with failing powers could select for attack. If the fragment be the prologue to a satire on military corruption and maladministration, its date would naturally be carried back to the time of Domitian's efforts to ingratiate himself with the soldiery, which began with the German campaign, 84 A. D.

From this sketch it appears that Juvenal must have been from five-and-twenty to thirty years in writing sixteen satires, one a fragment; and the difficulty is not greatly diminished if we take the second Junius and Fonteius; for even then his literary activity must be made to extend from the death of Domitian to at least 120 A.D. Nor can we assume that Juvenal wrote slowly because he wrote in a laboured style; for Statius, whose style is far more laboured, has left it on record that he finished poems as long as most of Juvenal's satires in two or three days. Of course it is possible to find a reason for many delays in the evidence, external and internal, that Juvenal's satires passed through much in the way of revision and expansion. Maternus (Tac. de Orat. III. 2, 3) could recite a tragedy on Cato one day, and the next sit down to consider how many of Cato's tirades or epigrams (it is distressing not to know which) should be transferred to Thyestes; but Maternus was almost as exceptional as Southey, who finished one epic over night and wrote a hundred lines of another

before breakfast the next morning. There are tempers to which it is easier to put aside what has to be altered for weeks, which grow into months. As tempers vary and our knowledge of Juvenal's is likely to remain imperfect, it is safest to remember the busy idleness in which a Roman gentleman passed his life at the capital, and the lazy leisure of the country holidays, which is indicated by Horace's Epistles, and the Eleventh Satire of Juvenal, and to conclude that the main business of Juvenal's life was to live, and that his satires were only occasional ebullitions of an indignation, not without intervals and consolations. "Facit indignatio versum" is his own motto; and indignation is not a permanent motive for exertion, since it is generally mixed with contempt; for there cannot be a better excuse for indolence than scorn of the only activity in which it is possible to take part. Our own Gifford was often invoked to lash the vices and follies of the age, but sensibly concluded that it was not worth while to be always in hot water for the sake of an age which needed so much lashing.

The writings of a satirist may easily leave us in doubt as to the events of his life: it is not certain that they will impress us with the character of the writer, or even that they will be, so far as they go, a trustworthy representation of his habitual self. We may reckon with more confidence upon finding traces of his personal ideas which are often distinctive, even when the character is commonplace; we may be sure of getting a tolerably complete view of the points at which life bore hardly upon the class and the generation which the satirist represents.

It is hardly fanciful to trace in Juvenal the last protest of the Marian democracy against the imperial system, as we trace in Tacitus the protest of the expiring aristocracy of Sulla, rather than of the effete oligarchy of Scaurus: like Sulla, Tacitus desired that the Senate should be an open corporation rather than a close one; like Sulla, he believed that the Senate ought to be in a position to govern the Roman Empire; unlike Sulla,