condemn him. Nero, when he slew Agrippina, had at least the extenuating causes of fear for his own life, and passionate revulsion against his mother's rule; but Nero, garlanded and anointed, strumming a harp on the public stage before Greeks and Syrians, was wantonly degrading the gods of a great patrician family, and desecrating the office of Pontifex Maximus.

Even in times near our own the profession of a player has been regarded as infamous by men who reflected the feelings of patrician society, and whose intellect might be supposed to raise them above its prejudices. 'A gentleman,' says Montesquieu in his notes on England, ‘had on various occasions betted as much as a hundred guineas at one to ten that he would act on the public stage. To play a part in order to get a thousand guineas! and this infamous action is not looked upon with horror.' Horace Walpole expressed a genuine contempt when he affected to doubt whether the infamous Madame du Barri would acknowledge Lord Barrymore as a relation when she found him' turned strolling player.' Lord Barrymore's offence had been pretty exactly that of Gracchus or Lentulus. He had acted twice, once in a private theatre, and once on the public stage, to promote the benefit of an actor who was one of his friends. Horace Walpole could not regard these appearances as a crime, but he felt them to be a grave impropriety, which of itself disqualified the man who committed it from fellowship or kindred with patrician society.

It is part of the same spirit of national pride in Juvenal, that he abhorred the affectation of speaking Greek and the craze for Greek accomplishments, which were overspreading Roman society. Cicero had many years before remarked that a patriot should read a notoriously wretched translation of Sophocles rather than the original. Béranger's dictum, 'I like a Frenchman to be a Frenchman,' is anticipated in the vigorous lines of the sixth Satire; she will ask for everything in Greek, though it is far more shameful for our own people not to know the Latin tongue.' National antipathy never went further than in the assertion that no modest woman ought to speak Greek after she had reached a certain age; but the gentle hint that a guest at the poet's table is to ask in Latin for what he wants is unexceptionable in tone. The serious motives of Juvenal's antipathy

are admirably explained in a passage of Tacitus (Dial. de Orat. 28, 29). Tacitus makes Messala describe how in the good old times the mother brought up her child on her own knees, and committed its education later on to some elder or ancient lady of the family, who never allowed her young charges to indulge in a foul word or an indecorous act. But now,' Messala goes on to say, 'the child as soon as it is born is entrusted to some Greek handmaid, who is helped by some one or other, not unfrequently the lowest of all the household, and who is not even fitted for any serious service; the tender and unformed minds presently receive the impress of these creatures' fables and delusions; nor does anyone in the whole house consider what he says or does before his young master.' What the 'famished Frenchman' of Dryden's time was to the Englishman, the hungry Greekling was in a much more real sense to the Roman of the old school. It was the Greekling who taught the child a foreign tongue and corrupted the boy (Petronius cap. 11), the Greekling who infected Roman civilization with exotic tastes, who thrust Italians and old family dependents from the household, who governed the family by becoming master of its

secrets.

So strong a hatred of whatever was not Italian, though it might act as a safeguard against foreign fashions and superstitions, had its drawback in keeping the poet from sympathy with a great deal of the best moral thought of his times. Juvenal at least was not a philosopher to whom, in the language of Gibbon's famous antithesis, all modes of worship were equally false. He rather resembled those literary purists of France and Spain, who have declined to learn a foreign language for fear of corrupting their native style and vocabulary. It was his boast that he had never cared to read the doctrines of the Cynics, of the Stoics, or of Epicurus, and we may fairly assume that he intended the repudiation to cover all Greek philosophy, in spite of a few words of admiration for Chrysippus and Thales and Socrates. If there was one religion that might have been supposed to commend itself to one who probably knew nothing of Christ's teaching, it would be the Jewish faith, with its simple doctrine of one God, its austere law, and its honourable freedom from immoral orgies. Some, however, of Juvenal's most

scathing lines are directed against Judaism, and it is curious to notice with what skill he has contrived to discover all the weak points in its harness. The belief in an abstract cloud-like deity without a mediator, the prohibition to eat pork, circumcision, the fierce intolerance of other nations' customs, the prejudice against the rendering of kindly offices to strangers, are all enumerated as essential parts of the religion. It may reasonably be assumed that Juvenal was unacquainted with Philo's defence of his people, and that he is not to be charged with deliberate unfairness. Even so it is remarkable that he should recoil so repugnantly from naked theism, and the fact may be counted as an additional proof that Juvenal was sincere in his reverence for the divinities of his own country, and liked to believe that he lived in a world where the gods were near men. His reproach of a bitter caste feeling against the Jews may seem to come with an ill grace from one who certainly would have regarded a marriage between Jew and Roman as impure; but it marks the change which world-wide empire and its necessities had introduced, since the time when a Roman citizen could not contract any obligation of the highest religious validity from marriage (connubium) to sale (sponsio) with a foreigner.

Juvenal's attitude towards literature is that of a man who wished to rise by it, and who was bitterly disappointed that neither eloquence nor poetry had helped him on in the race of life. The undesigned evidence of the Satires goes to show that he was rather the practical man, wielding literature as a weapon with which to hew his way in the world, than the literary man regarding study and the pursuit of the Muses as the highest good. When he speaks of how to train a child, he says that he is to be educated for statesmanship and military service and the management of an estate, and he praises the old austere life on a farm; but he nowhere gives a hint that philosophy or poetry is to be studied. His own boast that he was unlearned in Greek philosophy, the fierce diatribe against learned women, and the scorn of Greek versatility, must be taken as more than outweighing the genuine affection and respect evidently felt for Vergil and Tully, and the casual eulogies of Quintilian, Lucan, and Statius. It is probably to be imputed to a defective taste that the men whom Juvenal singles out in this

way for praise are declamatory and florid and given to false antithesis, and that he never glances off to admire the stately conciseness and nervous strength of Tacitus, or the best work of the minor Augustan poets. It is difficult also to resist the impression that Juvenal was half ashamed of literature; and that while he conceded the highest honours to a few of the immortals, such as Cicero and Vergil, he inclined to regard the pursuit of letters, where it was not justified by high genius, as disgraceful to a man of the highest family. He himself, a man of the middle class, who had endured the sea and the helmet and the spade, might without dishonour try to push himself by reciting satires, but it was a count in the indictment against Nero that he had written Troics.' The seventh Satire is throughout an enquiry how far literature and the learned professions pay. Poetry is put aside because the Thebais of Statius does not bring in money like a successful play; and of course on the same principle, it was a mistake to write 'La Légende des Siècles,' and Victor Hugo would have been better employed on composing a Homeric travesty for Mdlle. Schneider. So, again, the bar is condemned because its profits are carried off by a few leaders; and the profession of a teacher of rhetoric or grammar, because pupils are troublesome and parents stingy. Meanwhile, Juvenal, who had learnt to regard his literary life as a failure, was producing greater works than the wealthy amateur, Lucan, or the literary mechanic, Statius, precisely because he was not writing for amusement or for the profits of a rapid sale, but out of the depths of a burning indignation. The man's whole life, good and bad, is in his verse-personal disappointment and resentment, the scorn of whatever was foul and weak, the love of whatever was lofty and brave and Roman. It can scarcely be doubted that Juvenal's Satires were written for recitation. We can still trace the passages in which the poet had introduced a deft allusion and paused for applause; those in which he had contrived a surprise, that almost loses its point with a reader; and those in which he varied his effects for different audiences by a choice of illustrations, any one of which could be dovetailed into the main structure of the poem. There were several ways in which a poet might recite. He might try to collect a crowd in a temple, or some other place of

public resort, or he might get the loan of a room from a wealthy patron, or he might wait to be asked at a private party. The contempt with which Juvenal alludes to the public reciter, the bitterness with which he speaks of dependence upon a patron for the mere use of a hall, are slight reasons for supposing that he addressed select audiences, invited probably by circular, and meeting under a roof. There is evidence that recitations were very frequent in Rome, and that the necessity of attending them was felt to be a grave social infliction. Pliny, who mentions on one occasion that there had been public readings every day in the month of April, lets us know that a great many hearers went reluctantly and did not stay out the reading, and apologises on another occasion for going himself, on the ground that he was repaying a friend for attentions of the same kind. Pliny, however, records also that during a time of political liberty, probably under Nerva or Trajan, recitations became popular, and men were found to recite three days running, and could get audiences to listen to them, not, he remarks, because there is more eloquence than there used to be, but because it is possible to write with greater freedom, and so with greater pleasure to oneself. Juvenal's Satires-teeming with allusions that would be caught up in a moment, and breathing the spirit of aristocratic feeling as it lingered in the best sets are precisely the kind of literature that would be fashionable in such breathing-times as Pliny describes.

A poem written for recitation must, from the nature of the case, differ from a poem that is written to be read. It must be absolutely transparent. The reader may pause and think till he has mastered a subtle allusion or comprehended a deep thought more fully; the hearer is justly impatient if he loses the thread of an argument and cannot recover it. Juvenal's very style is direct. When he is not making positive statements, every point of which may be concluded in two or three lines, he is either ejaculating or asking questions. Lest a point should be missed he repeats it, and accumulates illustration upon illustration. Like almost every trained public speaker, he will sooner have a faulty construction than fail to call up a complete image before the eye. In the first Satire, lines 40 and 41, beginning 'unciolam Proculeius habet,' and part of lines 60 and 61, beginning at 'nam lora tenebat,' are