degree removed from his grandfather, who had been once a slave. But
Horace, speaking of him, gives him the best character of a father which I
ever read in history; and I wish a witty friend of mine, now living, had
such another. He bred him in the best school, and with the best company
of young noblemen; and Horace, by his gratitude to his memory, gives a
certain testimony that his education was ingenuous. After this he formed
himself abroad by the conversation of great men. Brutus found him at
Athens, and was so pleased with him that he took him thence into the
army, and made him _Tribunus Militum_ (a colonel in a legion), which was
the preferment of an old soldier. All this was before his acquaintance
with Mæcenas, and his introduction into the court of Augustus, and the
familiarity of that great emperor; which, had he not been well bred
before, had been enough to civilise his conversation, and render him
accomplished and knowing in all the arts of complacency and good
behaviour; and, in short, an agreeable companion for the retired hours
and privacies of a favourite who was first minister. So that upon the
whole matter Persius may be acknowledged to be equal with him in those
respects, though better born, and Juvenal inferior to both. If the
advantage be anywhere, it is on the side of Horace, as much as the court
of Augustus Cæsar was superior to that of Nero. As for the subjects
which they treated, it will appear hereafter that Horace wrote not
vulgarly on vulgar subjects, nor always chose them. His style is
constantly accommodated to his subject, either high or low. If his fault
be too much lowness, that of Persius is the fault of the hardness of his
metaphors and obscurity; and so they are equal in the failings of their
style, where Juvenal manifestly triumphs over both of them.
The comparison betwixt Horace and Juvenal is more difficult, because
their forces were more equal. A dispute has always been, and ever will
continue, betwixt the favourers of the two poets. _Non nostrum est
tantas componere lites_. I shall only venture to give my own opinion,
and leave it for better judges to determine. If it be only argued in
general which of them was the better poet, the victory is already gained
on the side of Horace. Virgil himself must yield to him in the delicacy
of his turns, his choice of words, and perhaps the purity of his Latin.
He who says that Pindar is inimitable, is himself inimitable in his odes;
but the contention betwixt these two great masters is for the prize of
satire, in which controversy all the odes and epodes of Horace are to
stand excluded. I say this because Horace has written many of them
satirically against his private enemies; yet these, if justly considered,
are somewhat of the nature of the Greek _silli_, which were invectives
against particular sects and persons. But Horace had purged himself of
this choler before he entered on those discourses which are more properly
called the Roman satire. He has not now to do with a Lyce, a Canidia, a
Cassius Severus, or a Menas; but is to correct the vices and the follies
of his time, and to give the rules of a happy and virtuous life. In a
word, that former sort of satire which is known in England by the name of
lampoon is a dangerous sort of weapon, and for the most part unlawful.
We have no moral right on the reputation of other men; it is taking from
them what we cannot restore to them. There are only two reasons for
which we may be permitted to write lampoons, and I will not promise that
they can always justify us. The first is revenge, when we have been
affronted in the same nature, or have been anywise notoriously abused,
and can make ourselves no other reparation. And yet we know that in
Christian charity all offences are to be forgiven, as we expect the like
pardon for those which we daily commit against Almighty God. And this
consideration has often made me tremble when I was saying our Saviour’s
prayer, for the plain condition of the forgiveness which we beg is the
pardoning of others the offences which they have done to us; for which
reason I have many times avoided the commission of that fault, even when
I have been notoriously provoked. Let not this, my lord, pass for vanity
in me; for it is truth. More libels have been written against me than
almost any man now living; and I had reason on my side to have defended
my own innocence. I speak not of my poetry, which I have wholly given up
to the critics—let them use it as they please—posterity, perhaps, may be
more favourable to me; for interest and passion will lie buried in
another age, and partiality and prejudice be forgotten. I speak of my
morals, which have been sufficiently aspersed—that only sort of
reputation ought to be dear to every honest man, and is to me. But let
the world witness for me that I have been often wanting to myself in that
particular; I have seldom answered any scurrilous lampoon when it was in
my power to have exposed my enemies; and, being naturally vindicative,
have suffered in silence, and possessed my soul in quiet.
Anything, though never so little, which a man speaks of himself, in my
opinion, is still too much; and therefore I will waive this subject, and
proceed to give the second reason which may justify a poet when he writes
against a particular person, and that is when he is become a public
nuisance. All those whom Horace in his satires, and Persius and Juvenal
have mentioned in theirs with a brand of infamy, are wholly such. It is
an action of virtue to make examples of vicious men. They may and ought
to be upbraided with their crimes and follies, both for their own
amendment (if they are not yet incorrigible), and for the terror of
others, to hinder them from falling into those enormities, which they see
are so severely punished in the persons of others. The first reason was
only an excuse for revenge; but this second is absolutely of a poet’s
office to perform. But how few lampooners are there now living who are
capable of this duty! When they come in my way, it is impossible
sometimes to avoid reading them. But, good God! how remote they are in
common justice from the choice of such persons as are the proper subject
of satire, and how little wit they bring for the support of their
injustice! The weaker sex is their most ordinary theme; and the best and
fairest are sure to be the most severely handled. Amongst men, those who
are prosperously unjust are entitled to a panegyric, but afflicted virtue
is insolently stabbed with all manner of reproaches; no decency is
considered, no fulsomeness omitted; no venom is wanting, as far as
dulness can supply it, for there is a perpetual dearth of wit, a
barrenness of good sense and entertainment. The neglect of the readers
will soon put an end to this sort of scribbling. There can be no
pleasantry where there is no wit, no impression can be made where there
is no truth for the foundation. To conclude: they are like the fruits of
the earth in this unnatural season; the corn which held up its head is
spoiled with rankness, but the greater part of the harvest is laid along,
and little of good income and wholesome nourishment is received into the
barns. This is almost a digression, I confess to your lordship; but a
just indignation forced it from me. Now I have removed this rubbish I
will return to the comparison of Juvenal and Horace.
I would willingly divide the palm betwixt them upon the two heads of
profit and delight, which are the two ends of poetry in general. It must
be granted by the favourers of Juvenal that Horace is the more copious
and more profitable in his instructions of human life; but in my
particular opinion, which I set not up for a standard to better
judgments, Juvenal is the more delightful author. I am profited by both,
I am pleased with both; but I owe more to Horace for my instruction, and
more to Juvenal for my pleasure. This, as I said, is my particular taste
of these two authors. They who will have either of them to excel the
other in both qualities, can scarce give better reasons for their opinion
than I for mine. But all unbiassed readers will conclude that my
moderation is not to be condemned; to such impartial men I must appeal,
for they who have already formed their judgment may justly stand
suspected of prejudice; and though all who are my readers will set up to
be my judges, I enter my caveat against them, that they ought not so much
as to be of my jury; or; if they be admitted, it is but reason that they
should first hear what I have to urge in the defence of my opinion.
That Horace is somewhat the better instructor of the two is proved from
hence—that his instructions are more general, Juvenal’s more limited. So
that, granting that the counsels which they give are equally good for
moral use, Horace, who gives the most various advice, and most applicable
to all occasions which can occur to us in the course of our lives—as
including in his discourses not only all the rules of morality, but also
of civil conversation—is undoubtedly to be preferred to him, who is more
circumscribed in his instructions, makes them to fewer people, and on
fewer occasions, than the other. I may be pardoned for using an old
saying, since it is true and to the purpose: _Bonum quò communius_, _eò
melius_. Juvenal, excepting only his first satire, is in all the rest
confined to the exposing of some particular vice; that he lashes, and
there he sticks. His sentences are truly shining and instructive; but
they are sprinkled here and there. Horace is teaching us in every line,
and is perpetually moral; he had found out the skill of Virgil to hide
his sentences, to give you the virtue of them without showing them in
their full extent, which is the ostentation of a poet, and not his art.
And this Petronius charges on the authors of his time as a vice of
writing, which was then growing on the age: _ne sententiæ extra corpus
orationis emineant_; he would have them weaved into the body of the work,
and not appear embossed upon it, and striking directly on the reader’s
view. Folly was the proper quarry of Horace, and not vice; and as there
are but few notoriously wicked men in comparison with a shoal of fools
and fops, so it is a harder thing to make a man wise than to make him
honest; for the will is only to be reclaimed in the one, but the
understanding is to be informed in the other. There are blind sides and
follies even in the professors of moral philosophy, and there is not any
one sect of them that Horace has not exposed; which, as it was not the
design of Juvenal, who was wholly employed in lashing vices (some of them
the most enormous that can be imagined), so perhaps it was not so much
his talent.
“_Omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico_
_Tangit_, _et admissus circum præcordia ludit_.”
This was the commendation which Persius gave him; where by _vitium_ he
means those little vices which we call follies, the defects of human
understanding, or at most the peccadilloes of life, rather than the
tragical vices to which men are hurried by their unruly passions and
exorbitant desires. But in the word _omne_, which is universal, he
concludes with me that the divine wit of Horace left nothing untouched;
that he entered into the inmost recesses of nature; found out the
imperfections even of the most wise and grave, as well as of the common
people; discovering even in the great Trebatius (to whom he addresses the
first satire) his hunting after business and following the court, as well
as in the prosecutor Crispinus, his impertinence and importunity. It is
true, he exposes Crispinus openly as a common nuisance; but he rallies
the other, as a friend, more finely. The exhortations of Persius are
confined to noblemen, and the Stoic philosophy is that alone which he
recommends to them; Juvenal exhorts to particular virtues, as they are
opposed to those vices against which he declaims; but Horace laughs to
shame all follies, and insinuates virtue rather by familiar examples than
by the severity of precepts.
This last consideration seems to incline the balance on the side of
Horace, and to give him the preference to Juvenal, not only in profit,
but in pleasure. But, after all, I must confess that the delight which
Horace gives me is but languishing (be pleased still to understand that I
speak of my own taste only); he may ravish other men, but I am too stupid
and insensible to be tickled. Where he barely grins himself, and, as
Scaliger says, only shows his white teeth, he cannot provoke me to any
laughter. His urbanity—that is, his good manners—are to be commended;
but his wit is faint, and his salt (if I may dare to say so) almost
insipid. Juvenal is of a more vigorous and masculine wit; he gives me as
much pleasure as I can bear; he fully satisfies my expectation; he treats
his subject home; his spleen is raised, and he raises mine. I have the
pleasure of concernment in all he says; he drives his reader along with
him, and when he is at the end of his way, I willingly stop with him. If
he went another stage, it would be too far; it would make a journey of a
progress, and turn delight into fatigue. When he gives over, it is a
sign the subject is exhausted, and the wit of man can carry it no
farther. If a fault can be justly found in him, it is that he is
sometimes too luxuriant, too redundant; says more than he needs, like my
friend “the Plain Dealer,” but never more than pleases. Add to this that
his thoughts are as just as those of Horace, and much more elevated; his
expressions are sonorous and more noble; his verse more numerous; and his
words are suitable to his thoughts, sublime and lofty. All these
contribute to the pleasure of the reader; and the greater the soul of him
who reads, his transports are the greater. Horace is always on the
amble, Juvenal on the gallop, but his way is perpetually on
carpet-ground. He goes with more impetuosity than Horace, but as
securely; and the swiftness adds a more lively agitation to the spirits.
The low style of Horace is according to his subject—that is, generally
grovelling. I question not but he could have raised it, for the first
epistle of the second book, which he writes to Augustus (a most
instructive satire concerning poetry), is of so much dignity in the
words, and of so much elegancy in the numbers, that the author plainly
shows the _sermo pedestris_ in his other satires was rather his choice
than his necessity. He was a rival to Lucilius, his predecessor, and was
resolved to surpass him in his own manner. Lucilius, as we see by his
remaining fragments, minded neither his style, nor his numbers, nor his
purity of words, nor his run of verse. Horace therefore copes with him
in that humble way of satire, writes under his own force, and carries a
dead weight, that he may match his competitor in the race. This, I
imagine, was the chief reason why he minded only the clearness of his
satire, and the cleanness of expression, without ascending to those
heights to which his own vigour might have carried him. But limiting his
desires only to the conquest of Lucilius, he had his ends of his rival,
who lived before him, but made way for a new conquest over himself by
Juvenal his successor. He could not give an equal pleasure to his
reader, because he used not equal instruments. The fault was in the
tools, and not in the workman. But versification and numbers are the
greatest pleasures of poetry. Virgil knew it, and practised both so
happily that, for aught I know, his greatest excellency is in his
diction. In all other parts of poetry he is faultless, but in this he
placed his chief perfection. And give me leave, my lord, since I have
here an apt occasion, to say that Virgil could have written sharper
satires than either Horace or Juvenal if he would have employed his
talent that way. I will produce a verse and half of his, in one of his
Eclogues, to justify my opinion, and with commas after every word, to
show that he has given almost as many lashes as he has written syllables.
It is against a bad poet, whose ill verses he describes:—
“_Non tu_, _in triviis indocte_, _solebas_
_Stridenti_, _miserum_, _stipulâ_, _disperdere carmen_?”
But to return to my purpose. When there is anything deficient in numbers
and sound, the reader is uneasy and unsatisfied; he wants something of
his complement, desires somewhat which he finds not: and this being the
manifest defect of Horace, it is no wonder that, finding it supplied in
Juvenal, we are more delighted with him. And besides this, the sauce of
Juvenal is more poignant, to create in us an appetite of reading him.
The meat of Horace is more nourishing, but the cookery of Juvenal more
exquisite; so that, granting Horace to be the more general philosopher,
we cannot deny that Juvenal was the greater poet—I mean, in satire. His
thoughts are sharper, his indignation against vice is more vehement, his
spirit has more of the commonwealth genius; he treats tyranny, and all
the vices attending it, as they deserve, with the utmost rigour; and
consequently a noble soul is better pleased with a zealous vindicator of
Roman liberty than with a temporising poet, a well-mannered court slave,
and a man who is often afraid of laughing in the right place—who is ever
decent, because he is naturally servile.
After all, Horace had the disadvantage of the times in which he lived;
they were better for the man, but worse for the satirist. It is
generally said that those enormous vices which were practised under the
reign of Domitian were unknown in the time of Augustus Cæsar; that
therefore Juvenal had a larger field than Horace. Little follies were
out of doors when oppression was to be scourged instead of avarice; it
was no longer time to turn into ridicule the false opinions of
philosophers when the Roman liberty was to be asserted. There was more
need of a Brutus in Domitian’s days to redeem or mend, than of a Horace,
if he had then been living, to laugh at a fly-catcher. This reflection
at the same time excuses Horace, but exalts Juvenal. I have ended,
before I was aware, the comparison of Horace and Juvenal upon the topics
of instruction and delight; and indeed I may safely here conclude that
commonplace: for if we make Horace our minister of state in satire, and
Juvenal of our private pleasures, I think the latter has no ill bargain
of it. Let profit have the pre-eminence of honour in the end of poetry;
pleasure, though but the second in degree, is the first in favour. And
who would not choose to be loved better rather than to be more esteemed!
But I am entered already upon another topic, which concerns the
particular merits of these two satirists. However, I will pursue my
business where I left it, and carry it farther than that common
observation of the several ages in which these authors flourished.
When Horace writ his satires, the monarchy of his Cæsar was in its
newness, and the government but just made easy to the conquered people.
They could not possibly have forgotten the usurpation of that prince upon
their freedom, nor the violent methods which he had used in the
compassing of that vast design; they yet remembered his proscriptions,
and the slaughter of so many noble Romans their defenders—amongst the
rest, that horrible action of his when he forced Livia from the arms of
her husband (who was constrained to see her married, as Dion relates the
story), and, big with child as she was, conveyed to the bed of his
insulting rival. The same Dion Cassius gives us another instance of the
crime before mentioned—that Cornelius Sisenna, being reproached in full
senate with the licentious conduct of his wife, returned this answer:
that he had married her by the counsel of Augustus (intimating, says my
author, that Augustus had obliged him to that marriage, that he might
under that covert have the more free access to her). His adulteries were
still before their eyes, but they must be patient where they had not
power. In other things that emperor was moderate enough; propriety was
generally secured, and the people entertained with public shows and
donatives, to make them more easily digest their lost liberty. But
Augustus, who was conscious to himself of so many crimes which he had
committed, thought in the first place to provide for his own reputation
by making an edict against lampoons and satires, and the authors of those
defamatory writings, which my author Tacitus, from the law-term, calls
_famosos libellos_.
In the first book of his Annals he gives the following account of it in
these words:—_Primus Augustus cognitionem de famosis libellis_, _specie
legis ejus_, _tractavit_; _commotus Cassii Severi libidine_, _quâ viros
fæminasque illustres procacibus scriptis diffamaverat_. Thus in
English:—“Augustus was the first who, under the colour of that law, took
cognisance of lampoons, being provoked to it by the petulancy of Cassius
Severus, who had defamed many illustrious persons of both sexes in his
writings.” The law to which Tacitus refers was _Lex læsæ majestatis_;
commonly called, for the sake of brevity, _majestas_; or, as we say,
high-treason. He means not that this law had not been enacted formerly
(for it had been made by the Decemviri, and was inscribed amongst the
rest in the Twelve Tables, to prevent the aspersion of the Roman majesty,
either of the people themselves, or their religion, or their magistrates;
and the infringement of it was capital—that is, the offender was whipped
to death with the fasces which were borne before their chief officers of
Rome), but Augustus was the first who restored that intermitted law. By
the words “under colour of that law” he insinuates that Augustus caused
it to be executed on pretence of those libels which were written by
Cassius Severus against the nobility, but in truth to save himself from
such defamatory verses. Suetonius likewise makes mention of it
thus:—_Sparsos de se in curiâ famosos libellos_, _nec exparit_, _et magnâ
curâ redarguit_. _Ac ne requisitis quidem auctoribus_, _id modo
censuit_, _cognoscendum posthac de iis qui libellos aut carmina ad
infamiam cujuspiam sub alieno nomine edant_. “Augustus was not afraid of
libels,” says that author, “yet he took all care imaginable to have them
answered, and then decreed that for the time to come the authors of them
should be punished.” But Aurelius makes it yet more clear, according to
my sense, that this emperor for his own sake durst not permit
them:—_Fecit id Augustus in speciem_, _et quasi gratificaretur populo
Romano_, _et primoribus urbis_; _sed revera ut sibi consuleret_: _nam
habuit in animo comprimere nimiam quorundam procacitatem in loquendo_, _à
quâ nec ipse exemptus fuit_. _Nam suo nomine compescere erat
invidiosum_, _sub alieno facile et utile_. _Ergo specie legis
tractavit_, _quasi populi Romani majestas infamaretur_. This, I think,
is a sufficient comment on that passage of Tacitus. I will add only by
the way that the whole family of the Cæsars and all their relations were
included in the law, because the majesty of the Romans in the time of the
Empire was wholly in that house: _Omnia Cæsar erat_; they were all
accounted sacred who belonged to him. As for Cassius Severus, he was
contemporary with Horace, and was the same poet against whom he writes in
his epodes under this title, _In Cassium Severum_, _maledicum
poctam_—perhaps intending to kill two crows, according to our proverb,
with one stone, and revenge both himself and his emperor together.
From hence I may reasonably conclude that Augustus, who was not
altogether so good as he was wise, had some by-respect in the enacting of
this law; for to do anything for nothing was not his maxim. Horace, as
he was a courtier, complied with the interest of his master; and,
avoiding the lashing of greater crimes, confined himself to the
ridiculing of petty vices and common follies, excepting only some
reserved cases in his odes and epodes of his own particular quarrels
(which either with permission of the magistrate or without it, every man
will revenge, though I say not that he should; for _prior læsit_ is a
good excuse in the civil law if Christianity had not taught us to
forgive). However, he was not the proper man to arraign great vices; at
least, if the stories which we hear of him are true—that he practised
some which I will not here mention, out of honour to him. It was not for
a Clodius to accuse adulterers, especially when Augustus was of that
number. So that, though his age was not exempted from the worst of
villainies, there was no freedom left to reprehend them by reason of the
edict; and our poet was not fit to represent them in an odious character,
because himself was dipped in the same actions. Upon this account,
without further insisting on the different tempers of Juvenal and Horace,
I conclude that the subjects which Horace chose for satire are of a lower
nature than those of which Juvenal has written.