of verses 1-55,- and possibly the sixteenth, are the only genuine productions of Juvenal preserved to us, and they themselves are disfigured with interpolations, corruptions, and transpositions of verses. The remaining satires, together with the introductions to the fourth and eleventh, are the tasteless forgeries of some unknown declamator, a hungry commonplace poet, to whose combination with a speculating bookseller they owe their origin. That there is a marked difference between the two divisions of the reputed works of Juvenal which Ribbeck has made, cannot be denied. The satires admitted to be genuine, deal directly with men, manners, vices, follies, and are a rich storehouse of information in regard to the condition of Roman society in the time when they were written. They are the indignant voice of a live man lashing real vices of real men. The satires of the other class are declamations on stock themes, illustrated by stock characters, Alexander, Hannibal, Priam, gods and goddesses. They could have been written by a recluse pedant; the others could only have come from a man of vigorous sense and keen observation, who knew the world. In literary execution, the satires of the second class are inferior to those of the first; it has been charged against them, not without truth, that they are spun out, their style is sometimes turgid, the illustrations sometimes inapt. But these differences Ribbeck greatly exaggerates. He speaks of the declamator with a contempt quite unwarranted. There are great beauties in the disputed satires,-whatever their defects,—to which the world will never refuse its admiration. Ribbeck has perhaps succeeded in opening a question which will never be fully settled. The vital defect, however, of his argument lies in the impossibility of fixing the precise limits of possible variation in quality between different productions of the same mind. It would not be difficult to cite among the acknowledged works of other authors, ancient and modern, instances of as great difference as exists between these two divisions of Juvenal's satires. Nor is a satisfactory explanation of the variance impossible. The lively, vigorous, burning satires wrote themselves. Fecit indignatio versum. The others were written in cold blood, either (as I think it most probable) by a man whose reputation was already established, so that he had a market for his wares, and at an advanced age when calm reflection and even commonplace generalization are more natural than keen observation and impetuous sallies of temper, or by a young rhetorician whose fiery zeal is yet to be excited when he leaves his books and reads in actual life the stern lessons of which the seething mass of Roman society in the imperial times was full. We have more reason to doubt whether all the satires as we have them received their author's final touches and editorial revision. Carelessness may account for some of the faults which have been charged to forgery. It is generally safe to leave a reader to discover and judge for himself the characteristics of the author who engages his attention; but I can hardly refrain from inserting here some lively remarks of Lewis upon the great Roman şatirist : "In depicting character, in drawing scenes, even in turns of expression, Juvenal is, of all ancient authors, the most distinctly modern. His scenes are manipulated with a few broad touches, in which the salient points are always brought into the foreground; and it has been well observed that a painter of kindred genius would have If we small difficulty in transferring them to canvas. believed in the metempsychosis doctrine, we might almost suppose that the soul of Juvenal reappeared in Hogarth. The crowd hurrying to the sportula or 'dole;' the streets of Rome by day and night; the court of Domitian, his worthless parasites and their trumpery subjects of discussion; the poor dependent dining with the rich patron, and the insults he is exposed to; the senator's wife eloping with a gladiator; the interior of fashionable ladies' boudoirs, and the frivolous pursuits and superstitions of ladies of rank; the arts and shifts of starveling poets; the nobleman addicted to the turf; the aspect of the city on the fall of a great minister; a tête-à-tête supper of two friends: these and many other scenes of Roman life are brought before us with the vivid touches of a Defoe or a Swift. They are 'sketches' in the modern sense; and I know of nothing exactly resembling them in any other ancient author. The modes of expression, again, the turns of thought, the humor, are often distinctly modern, and such as we should look for in the pages of Fielding or Thackeray. The upstart coming on in his litter, which is filled up by himself;' the poor man who had nothing, it is true, but who lost all that nothing' in the fire; the sycophant who, when his patron complains of the heat, immediately 'sweats;' 'the rustic infaut in his mother's lap, gazing with horror at the frightful mask of the actor' when taken to the play; the chaff, as we style it, of the fast young Roman noble directed against the plebeian whom he is going to pommel, 'Whose vinegar and beans are you distended with ? What cobbler have you been supping off sheep's-head with, you beggar?' the description of the fight, if fight it may be called, where one man does the pommelling and the 6 other man's part is limited to being pommelled;' the prayer of the poor wretch that he may be allowed to return home with a few teeth left him;' the compliment of the fisherman on presenting an enormous turbot to Domitian, Depend upon it, sire, the fish got himself caught on purpose!' the school-master whose class proceeds to 'destroy wicked tyrants,' and whose head is made to ache by that dreadful Hannibal;' Hannibal himself stalking across the Alps 'in order to amuse school-boys, and be turned into the theme for an exercise ;' the exclamations of the Romans on hearing of the fall of Sejanus, 'Believe me, there was something about that man which I never liked. What a repulsive countenance he had, to be sure!' the picture of the old ex-Dictator, in the primitive times, trudging off with a spade over his shoulder to a supper party, where bacon and perhaps a trifle of fresh meat were to be the fare, with a dash of haste' so as to be sure to be in time; the advice to the civilian in a dispute with soldiers never to commence an action, with only two legs to plead against a thousand hobnails; such turns of expression as the fires, the falling in of roofs, the thousand perils of cruel Rome, last of all, the poets reciting in the dog-days;' or again, in a comparison of Orestes and Nero, 'At any rate, Orestes did not murder his sister and his wife, he did not poison his relations, he did not write rubbishy poems about Troy;' the remark about Horace, 'Horace has had enough to eat when he cries out 'Euoe!'examples of this kind might be multiplied in support of my assertion that there is in Juvenal a humor quite distinct from the quaint humor of Plautus and the delicate banter of Horace, of which no example existed previous to his time in Roman literature, while modern literature furnishes much that is akin to it." D. IVNII IVVENALIS SATVRA E. I. SEMPER ego auditor tantum? numquamne reponam, impune ergo mihi recitaverit ille togatas, 5 nota magis nulli domus est sua, quam mihi lucus 10 pelliculae, quantas jaculetur Monychus ornos, Frontonis platani convulsaque marmora clamant semper et adsiduo ruptae lectore columnae : exspectes eadem a summo minimoque poeta. et nos ergo manum ferulae subduximus, et nos 15 |