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any ungraceful effort from light ridicule to heightened earnestness— passing at once with Horace from a ludicrous description of a poet as a marked man, to an emphatic recognition of his essential greatness; or with Juvenal from a sneer at the contemptible offerings with which the gods were commonly propitiated, to a sublime recital of the blessings which may lawfully be made objects of prayer. This plastic comprehensiveness was realized by the earlier writers, as we have seen, by means of the variety of their metres, while the later were enabled to compass it more artistically by that skilful management of the hexameter which could not be brought to perfection in a day. But the conception appears to have been radically the same throughout; and the very name satura already contains a prophecy of the distinctive value of Roman satire as a point in the history of letters.

If, however, the praise of having originated satire cannot be refused to Ennius, it must be confessed as freely that the influence exercised over it by Lucilius entitles him to be called its second father. It belongs to one by the ties of birth-to the other by those of adoption and education. Unlike Ennius, the glories of whose invention may well have paled before his fame as the Roman Homer and the Roman Euripides, Lucilius seems to have devoted himself wholly to fostering the growth and forming the mind of the satiric muse. He is thought to have so far departed from the form of the old medley as to enforce a uniformity of metre in each separate satire, though even this is not certainly made out; but he preserved the external variety by writing sometimes in hexameter, sometimes in iambics or trochaics, and also by a practice, seemingly peculiar to himself, of mixing Latin copiously with Greek, the language corresponding to French in the polite circles of Rome. It is evident, too, both from his numerous fragments and from the notices of the early grammarians, that he encouraged to a large extent the satiric tendency to diversity of subject-at one moment soaring on the wing of epic poetry and describing a council of the gods in language which Virgil has copied, the next satirizing the fashion of giving fine Greek names to articles of domestic furniture,-comprehending in the same satire a description of a journey from Rome to Capua, and a series of strictures on his predecessors in poetry, whom he seems to have corrected like so many school-boys;-now laying down the law about the niceties of grammar, showing how the second conjugation is to be discriminated from the third, and the genitive singular from the nominative plural; and now talking, possibly within a few lines, of seizing an antagonist by the nose, dashing his fist in his face, and knocking out every tooth in his head. But his great achievement, as attested by the impression left on the minds of his Roman readers,

was that of making satire henceforward synonymous with free speaking and personality—he comes before us as the reviver of the Fescennine licence, the imitator of Cratinus and Eupolis and Aristophanes. There seems to have been about him a reckless animal pugnacity, an exhilarating consciousness of his powers as a good hater, which in its rude simplicity may remind us of Archilochus, and certainly is but faintly represented in the arch pleasantry of Horace, the concentrated intellectual scorn of Persius, or of the declamatory indignation of Juvenal. Living in a period of political excitement, he plunged eagerly into party quarrels. The companion of the younger Scipio and Laelius, though a mere boy, and himself of equestrian rank, he attacked great consular personages who had opposed his friends: as Horace phrases it, he tore away the veil from private life and arraigned high and low alike—showing no favour but to virtue and the virtuous-words generally found to bear a tolerably precise meaning in the vocabulary of politics. It was the satire of the republic, or rather of the old oligarchy, and it was impossible that it could live on unchanged into the times of the Empire. But the memory of its day of freedom was not forgotten: the ancient right of impeachment was claimed formally by men who intended no more than a common criminal information; and each succeeding satirist sheltered himself ostentatiously under an example of which he knew better than to attempt to avail himself in practice.

It was to Lucilius, as we have already seen, that Persius, if reliance is to be placed on the statement of his biographer, owed the impulse that made him a writer of satire. Of the actual work which is related to have produced so remarkable an effect on its young reader, the tenth book, scarcely anything has been preserved; while the remains of the fourth, which is said to have been the model of Persius' third satire, comparatively copious and interesting as they are, contains nothing which would enable us to judge for ourselves of the degree of resemblance. Hardly a single parallel from Lucilius is quoted by the Scholiasts on any part of Persius but when we consider that the aggregate of their citations from Horace, though much larger, is utterly inadequate to express the obligations which are everywhere obvious to the eye of a modern. scholar, we cannot take their omissions as even a presumptive proof that what is not apparent does not exist. On the other hand, the Prologue to the Satires, in scazon iambics, is supposed, on the authority of an obscure passage in Petronius, to have had its prototype in a similar composition by Lucilius; and it is also a plausible conjecture that the first line of the first satire is taken bodily from the old poettwo distinct proclamations of adhesion at the very outset, in the ears of those who could not fail to understand them. There is reason, also,

for believing that the imitation may have extended further, and that Persius' strictures on the poets of his day, and in particular on those who affected a taste for archaisms, and professed to read the old Roman drama with delight, may have been studied after those irreverent criticisms of the fathers of poetry, some of which, as the Scholiasts on Horace inform us, occurred in this very tenth book of Lucilius. On the ethical side we should have been hardly prepared to expect much similarity there is, however, a curious fragment of Lucilius, the longest of all that have come down to us, containing a simple recital of the various constituents of virtue, the knowledge of duty no less than its practice, in itself sufficiently resembling the enumeration of the elements. of morality which Persius makes on more than one occasion, and showing a turn for doctrinal exposition which was sure to be appreciated by a pupil of the Stoics. So there are not wanting indications that the bold metaphors and grotesque yet forcible imagery which stamp the character of Persius' style so markedly may have been encouraged if not suggested by hints in Lucilius, who was fond of tentative experiments in language, such as belong to the early stages of poetry, when the national taste is in a state of fusion. The admitted contrast between the two men, unlike in all but their equestrian descent,between the premature man of the world and the young philosopher, the improvisatore who could throw off two hundred verses in an hour, and the student who wrote seldom and slowly,-may warrant us in doubting the success of the imitation, but does not discredit the fact. Our point is, that Persius attempted to wear the toga of his predecessor, not that it fitted him.

The influence of Horace upon Persius is a topic which has, in part, been anticipated already. It is a patent fact which may be safely assumed, and I have naturally been led to assume it as a help towards estimating other things which are not so easily ascertainable. Casaubon was, I believe, the first to bring it forward prominently into light in an appendix to his memorable edition of Persius; and though one of the later commentators has endeavoured to call it in question, cautioning us against mistaking slight coincidences for palpable imitations, I am confident that a careful and minute study of Persius, such as I have lately been engaged in, will be found only to produce a more complete conviction of its truth: nor can I doubt that an equally careful perusal of Horace, line by line and word by word, would enable us to add still further to the amount of proof. Yet it is curious and instructive to observe that it is a point which, while established by a superabundance of the best possible evidence, that of ocular demonstration, is yet singularly deficient in those minor elements of probability to which we are

constantly accustomed to look in the absence of anything more directly conclusive. The memoir of Persius mentions Lucilius, but says not a word of Horace: the quotations from Horace in the commentary of the pseudo-Cornutus are, as I have said, far from numerous: while the difference of the poets themselves, their personal history, their philosophical profession, their taste and temperament, the nature and power of their genius, is greater even than in the case of Persius and Lucilius, and is only more clearly brought out by the clearer knowledge we possess of each, in the possession of the whole of their respective works. The fact, however, is only too palpable-so much so that it puzzles us, as it were, by its very plainness: we could understand a less degree of imitation, but the correspondence which we actually see makes us, so to speak, half incredulous, and compels us to seek some account of it. It is not merely that we fi d the same topics in each, the same class of allusions and illustrations, or even the same thoughts and the same images but the resemblance or identity extends to things which every poet, in virtue of his own peculiarities and those of his time, would naturally be expected to provide for himself. With him, as with Horace, a miser is a man who drinks vinegar for wine, and stints himself in the oil which he pours on his vegetables; while a contented man is one who acquiesces in the prosperity of people whose start in life is worse than his own. The prayer of the farmer is still that he may turn up a pot of money some day while he is ploughing: the poets hope is still that his verses may be embalmed with cedar oil, his worst fear still that they may furnish wrapping for spices. Nay, where he mentions names. they are apt to be the names of Horatian personages: his great physician is Craterus, his grasping rich man Nerius, his crabbed censor Bestius, his low reprobate Natta. Something is doubtless due to the existence of what, to adopt a term applied by Colonel Mure to the Greek epic writers, we may call satirical commonplace, just as Horace himself is thought to have taken the name Nomentanus from Lucilius; or as, among our own satirists, Bishop Hall talks of Labeo, and Pope of Gorgonius. So Persius may have intended not so much to copy Horace as to quote him-advertising his readers, as it were, from time to time that he was using the language of satire. But the utmost that can be proved is, that he followed prodigally an example which had been set sparingly, not knowing or not remembering that satire is a kind of composition which of all others is kept alive not by antiquarian associations, but by contemporary interest-not by generalized conventionalities, but by direct individual protraiture. We can hardly doubt that a wider worldly knowledge would have led him to correct his error of judgment, though the history of English authors shows us, in at least one

instance, that of Ben Jonson, that a man, not only of true comic genius but of large experiences of life, may be so enslaved by acquired learning as to satirize vice and folly as he reads of it in his books, rather than as he sees it in society.

But time warns me that I must leave the yet unfinished list of the influences which worked or may have worked upon Persius, and say a few words upon his actual merits as a writer. The tendency of what has been advanced hitherto has been to make us think of him as more passive than active—as a candidate more for our interest and our sympathy than for our admiration. But we must not forget that it is his own excellence that has made him a classic-that the great and true glory which, as Quintilian says, he gained by a single volume, has been due to that volume alone. If we would justify the award of his contemporaries and of posterity, we may be prepared to account for it. It was not, as we have seen, that he was an originating power in philosophy, or a many-sided observer of men and manners. He was a satirist, but he shows no knowledge of many of the ingredients which, as Juvenal rightly perceived, go to make up the satiric medley. He was what in modern parlance would be called a plagiarist—a charge which, later if not sooner, must have told fatally on an otherwise unsupported reputation. I might add that he is frequently perplexed in arrangement and habitually obscure in meaning, were it not that some judges have professed to discover in this the secret of his fame. A truer appreciation will, I believe, be more likely to find it in the distinct and individual character of his writings, the power of mind and depth of feeling visible throughout, the austere purity of his moral tone, relieved by frequent outbreaks of genial humour, and the condensed vigour and graphic freshness of a style where elaborate art seems to be only nature triumphing over obstacles. Probably no writer ever borrowed so much and yet left on the mind so decided an impression of originality. His description of the wilful invalid and his medical friend in the third satire owes much of its colouring to Horace, yet the whole presentation is felt to be his own-true, pointed, and sufficient. Even when the picture is entirely Horatian, like that of the over covetous man at his prayers, in the second satire, the effect is original still, though the very varieties. which discriminate it may be referred to hints in other parts of Horace's own works. We may wish that he had painted from his own observation and knowledge, but we cannot deny that he has shown a painter's power. And where he draws the life that he must have known, not from the descriptions of a past age but from his own experience, his portraits have an imaginative truth, minutely accurate yet highly ideal, which would entitle them to a distinguished place in any poetical gallery.

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