reason.

"In a word, he labours to render us happy in relation to ourselves, agreeable and faithful to our friends, and discreet, serviceable, and well-bred in relation to those with whom we are obliged to live, and to converse. To make his figures intelligible, to conduct his readers through the labyrinth of some perplexed sentence, or obscure parenthesis, is no great matter: and, as Epictetus says, there is nothing of beauty in all this, or what is worthy of a prudent man. The principal busi

to consider, if Juvenal, a man of excellent natural | the principles and motives of all our actions; and endowments, besides the advantages of diligence to avoid the ridicule, into which all men necesand study, and coming after him, and building sarily fall, who are intoxicated with those notions upon his foundations, might not probably, with which they have received from their masters; all these helps, surpass him? And whether it be and (which they obstinately retain, without exaany dishonour to Horace to be thus surpassed; mining whether or no they be founded on right since no art, or science, is at once begun and perfected, but that it must pass first through many hands, and even through several ages? If Lucilius could add to Ennius, and Horace to Lucilius, why, without any diminution to the fame of Horace, might not Juvenal give the last perfection to that work? Or rather, what disreputation is it to Horace, that Juvenal excels in the tragical satire, as Horace does in the comical? I have read over attentively both Heinsius and Dacier, in their commendations of Horace; but I can find no more in either of them, for the pre-ness, and which is of most importance to us, is ference of him to Juvenal, than the instructive to show the use, the reason, and the proof of his part; the part of wisdom, and not that of plea- precepts. sure; which therefore is here allowed him, notwithstanding what Scaliger and Rigaltius have pleaded to the contrary for Juvenal. And, to show that I am impartial, I will here translate what Dacier has said on that subject.

“I cannot give a more just idea of the two books of satires made by Horace, than by comparing them to the statues of the Sileni, to which Alcibiades compares Socrates, in the Symposium. They were figures which had nothing of agreeable, nothing of beauty on their outside: but when any one took the pains to open them, and search into them, he there found the figures of all the deities. So, in the shape that Horace presents himself to us, in his satires, we see nothing at the first view which deserves our attention. It seems that he is rather an amusement for children, than for the serious consideration of men: but when we take away his crust, and that which hides him from our sight, when we discover him to the bottom, then we find all the divinities in a full assembly: that is to say, all the virtues which ought to be the continual exercise of those, who seriously endeavour to correct their vices."

It is easy to observe, that Dacier, in this noble similitude, has confined the praise of his author wholly to the instructive part: the commendation turns on this, and so does that which follows.

"In these two books of satire, it is the business of Horace to instruct us how to combat our vices, to regulate our passions, to follow nature, to give bounds to our desires, to distinguish betwixt truth and falsehood, and betwixt our conception of things and things themselves: to come back from our prejudicate opinions, to understand exactly

"They who endeavour not to correct themselves, according to so exact a model, are just like the patients, who have open before them a book of admirable receipts for their diseases, and please themselves with reading it, without comprehending the nature of the remedies, or how to apply them to their cure."

Let Horace go off with these encomiums, which he has so well deserved.

To conclude the contention betwixt our three poets, I will use the words of Virgil, in his fifth Eneid, where Æneas proposes the rewards of the foot-race, to the three first who should reach the goal.

Tres præmia primi accipient, flavaque caput nectentur olivâ: Let these three ancients be preferred to all the moderns; as first arriving at the goal: let them all be crowned as victors, with the wreath that properly belongs to satire. But, after that, with this distinction amongst themselves, Primus equum phaleris insignem victor habeto. Let Juvenal ride first in triumph. Alter Amazoniam pharetram, plenamque sagittis Threiciis, lato quam circumplectitur auro balteus, & tereti subnectit figula gemma. Let Horace, who is the second, and but just the second, carry off the quivers and the arrows, as the badges of his satire: and the golden-belt, and the diamond-button: Tertius, Argolico hoc Clypeo contentus abito. And let Persius, the last of the first three worthies, be contented with this Grecian shield, and with victory, not only over all the Grecians, who were ignorant of the Roman satire, but over all the moderns in succeeding age; _excepting Boileau and your lordship.

And thus I have given the history of satire, and

derived it from Ennius, to your lordship; that is, from its first rudiments of barbarity, to its last polishing and perfection: which is, with Virgil, in his address to Augustus,

nomen famâ tot ferre per annos, Tithoni primâ quot abest ab origine Cæsar. I said only from Ennius; but I may safely carry it higher, as far as Livius Andronicus; who, as I have said formerly, taught the fist play at Rome, in the year ab urbe conditá cccccxiv. I have since desired my learned friend, Mr. Maidwell, to compute the difference of times, betwixt Aristophanes and Livius Andronicus; and he assures me from the best chronologers, that Plutus, the last of Aristophanes's plays, was represented at Athens, in the year of the 97th olympiad; which agrees with the year urbis condita ccCI XIV. So that the difference of years betwixt Aristophanes and Andronicus is 150; from whence I have probably deduced, that Livius Andronicus, who was a Grecian, had read the plays of the old comedy, which were satirical, and also of the new; for Menander was fifty years before him, which must needs be a great light to him, in his own plays, that were of the satirical nature. That the Romans had farces before this, it is true; but then they had no communication with Greece: so that Andronicus was the first who wrote after the manner of the old

but for the most part figuratively, and occultly; consisting in a low familiar way, chiefly in a sharp and pungent manner of speech; but partly, also, in a facetious and civil way of jesting; by which either hatred, or laughter, or indignation is moved."-Where I cannot but observe, that this obscure and perplexed definition, or rather description of satire, is wholly accommodated to the and Persius, as foreign from that kind of poem: Horatian way; and, excluding the works of Juvenal the clause in the beginning of it (“without a from stage-plays, which are all of one action, and series of action") distinguishes satire properly one continued series of action. The end or scope of satire is to purge the passions; so far it is common to the satires of Juvenal and Persius: the rest which follows, is also generally belonging to all three; till he comes upon us, with the excluding which is the proper character of Horace; and clause" consisting in a low familiar way of speech,” from which, the other two, for their honour be it spoken, are far distant: but how come lowness of style, and the familiarity of words, to be so much the propriety of satire, that without them, a poet can be no more a satirist, than without risibility he can be a man? Is the fault of Horace to be made the virtue and standing rule of this poem? Is the grande sophos of Persius, and the

comedy, in his plays; he was imitated by Ennius, sublimity of Juvenal to be circumscribed, with the

meanness of words, and vulgarity of expression? If Horace refused the pains of numbers, and the

about thirty years afterwards. Though the former writ fables; the latter, speaking properly, loftiness of figures, are they bound to follow so ill began the Roman satire. According to that description, which Juvenal gives of it in his first; quic-in his hand, for his own pleasure; but let not a precedent? Let him walk a-foot with his pad quid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli. This is that in which I have made bold to differ from Casaubon, Rigaltius, Dacier, and indeed from all the modern critics, that not Ennius, but Andronicus was the first, who by the Archea Comedia of the Greeks, added many beauties to the first rude and barbarous Roman satire: which sort of poem, though we had not derived from Rome, yet nature teaches it mankind, in all ages, and in every country.

It is but necessary, that, after so much has been said of satire, some definition cf it should be given. Heinsius, in his dissertations on Horace, makes it for me, in these words; "Satire is a kind of poetry, without a series of action, invented for the purging of our minds; in which human vices, ignorance, and errours, and all things besides, which are produced from them, in every man, are severely reprehended; partly dramatically, partly simply, and sometimes in both kinds of speaking;

them be accounted no poets, who chuse to mount and show their horsemanship. Holiday is not afraid to say, that there never was such a fall, as from his odes to his satires, and that he, injuriously to himself, untuned his harp. The majestic way of Persius and Juvenal was new when they began it, but it is old to us; and what poems have not, with time, received an alteration in their fashion? Which alteration, says Holiday, is to after-times, as good a warrant as the first. Has not Virgil changed the manners of Homer's heroes in his Eneid? Certainly he has, and for the better. For Virgil's age was more civilized, and better bred: and he writ according to the politeness of Rome, under the reign of Augustus Cæsar; not to the rudeness of Agamemnon's age, or the times of Homer. Why should we offer to confine free spirits to one form, when we cannot so much as confine our bodies to one fashion of apparel? Would not Donne's satires, which abound with so much

of his words, and of his numbers? But he followed Horace so very close, that of necessity he must fall with him: and I may safely say it of this present age, that if we are not so great wits as Donne, yet certainly, we are better poets.

wit, appear more charming, if he had taken care | subject. I know it may be urged in defence of Horace, that this unity is not necessary; because the very word satura signifies a dish plentifully stored with all variety of fruit and grains. Yet Juvenal, who calls his poems a farrago, which is a word of the same signification with salura, has chosen to follow the same method of Persius, and not of Horace. And Boileau, whose example alone is a sufficient authority, has wholly confined himself, in all his satires, to this unity of design. That variety which is not to be found in any one satire, is at least, in many, written on several occasions. And if variety be of absolute necessity in every one of them, according to the etymology of the word; yet it may arise naturally from one subject, as it is diversly treated in the several subordinate branches of it; all relating to the chief. It may be illustrated accordingly with variety of examples in the subdivisions of it; and with as many precepts as there are members of it; which altogether may complete that olla, or hotch-potch, which is properly a satire.

But I have said enough, and it may be too much, on this subject. Will your lordship be pleased to prolong my audience, only so far, till I tell your my own trivial thoughts how a modern satire should be made. I will not deviate in the least from the precepts and examples of the ancients, who were always our best masters. I will only illustrate them, and discover some of the hidden beauties in their designs, that we thereby Will may form our own in imitation of them. you please but to observe, that Persius, the least in dignity of all the three, has notwithstanding been the first, who has discovered to us this important secret, in the designing of a perfect satire, that it ought only to treat of one subject; to be confined to one particular theme; or, at least, to one principally. If other vices occur in the management of the chief, they should only be transiently lashed, and not be insisted on, so as to make the design double. As in a play of the English fashion, which we call a tragi-comedy, there is to be but one main design: and though there be an underplot, or second walk of comical characters and adventures, yet they are subservient to the chief fable, carried along under it, and helping to it; so that the drama may not seem a monster with two heads. Thus the Copernican system of the planets makes the Moon to be moved by the motion of the Earth, and carried about her orb, as a dependent of hers. Mascardi, in his discourse of the Doppia favola, or double tale in plays, gives an instance of it, in the famous pas toral of Guarini, called Il Pastor Fido; where Corisca and the Satyr are the under-parts: yet we may observe, that Corisca is brought into the body of the plot, and made subservient to it. It is certain that the divine wit of Horace was not ignorant of this rule, that a play, though it consists of many parts, must yet be one in the action, and must drive on the accomplishment of one design; for he gives this very precept, Sit quodvis simplex duntaxat & unum; yet he seems not much to mind it in his satires, many of them consisting of more arguments than one; and the second without dependance on the first. Casaubon has observed this before me, in his preference of Persius to Horace and will have his own beloved author to be the first, who found out, and introduced this method of confining himself to one

and insist on that.

Under this unity of theme, or subject, iş comprehended another rule for perfecting the design of true satire. The poet is bound, and that ex officio, to give his reader some one precept of moral virtue, and to caution him against some one particular vice or folly. Other virtues, subordinate to the first, may be recommended, under that chief head; and other vices or follies may be scourged, besides that which he principally intends. But he is chiefly to inculcate one virtue, Thus Juvenal, in every satire, excepting the first, ties himself to one principal instructive point, or to the shunning of moral evil. Even in the sixth, which seems only an arraignîment of the whole sex of womankind, there is a latent admonition to avoid ill women, by showing how very few, who are virtuous and good, are to be found amongst them. But this, though the wittiest of all his satires, has yet the least of truth He has run himself into bis or instruction in it. old declamatory way, and almost forgotten that he was now setting up for a moral poet.

Persius is never wanting to us in some profitable doctrine, and in exposing the opposite vices to it. His kind of philosophy is one, which is the stoic; and every satire is a comment on one particular dogma of that sect; unless we will except the first, which is against bad writers; and yet even there he forgets not the precepts of the porch. In general, all virtues are every where to be praised and recommended to practice; and all vices to be reprehended, and made either odious or ridiculous:

eight.

or else there is a fundamental errour in the whole | hand, that I would prefer the verse of ten sylladesign. bles, which we call the English heroic, to that of I have already declared who are the only perThis is truly my opinion: for this sort of sons that are the adequate object of private satire, number is more roomy: the thought can turn and who they are that may properly be exposed itself with greater case in a larger compass. When by name for public examples of vices and follies: the rhyme comes too thick upon us, it straitens and therefore I will trouble your lordship no far- the expression; we are thinking of the close, ther with them. Of the best and finest manner of when we should be employed in adorning the satire, I have said enough in the comparison betwixt thought. It makes a poet giddy with turning in Juvenal and Horace it is that sharp, well-man- a space too narrow for his imagination; he loses nered way of laughing a folly out of countenance, many beauties, without gaining one advantage. of which your lordship is the best master in this For a burlesque rhyme, I have already concluded age. I will proceed to the versification, which is to be none; or if it were, it is more easily purmost proper for it, and add somewhat to what chased in ten syllables than in eight: in both ocI have said already on that subject. The sort of casions it is as in a tennis-court, when the strokes verse which is called burlesque, consisting of eight of greater force are given, when we strike out syllables, or four feet, is that which our excel- and play at length. Tasso and Boileau have lent Hudibrass has chosen. I ought to have men- left us the best examples of this way, in the Sectioned him before, when I spake of Donne; but chia Rapita, and the Lutrin. And next them by a slip of an old man's memory, he was for- Merlin Coccajus in his Baldus. I will speak only gotten. The worth of his poem is too well known of the two former, because the latter is written in to need any commendation, and he is above my Latin verse. The Secchia Rapita is an Italian censure: his satire is of the Varronian kind, poem, a satire of the Varronian kind. It is though unmixed with prose. The choice of his written in the stanza of eight, which is their numbers is suitable enough to his design, as he measure for heroic verse. The words are stately, has managed it: but in any other hand, the short- the numbers smooth, the turn both of thoughts ness of his verse, and the quick returns of rhyme, and words is happy. The first six lines of the bad debased the dignity of style. And besides, stanza seem majestical and severe, but the two the double rhyme (a necessary companion of bur- last turn them all into a pleasant ridicule. Boilesque writing) is not so proper for manly satire, leau, if I am not much deceived, has modelled for it turns earnest too much to jest, and gives from hence his famous Lutrin. He had read the us a boyish kind of pleasure. It tickles aukwardly burlesque poetry of Scarron, with some kind of with a kind of pain, to the best sort of readers; indignation, as witty as it was, and found nothing we are pleased ungratefully, and, if I may say so, in France that was worthy of his imitation. But against our liking. We thank him not for giving he copied the Italian so well, that his own may us that unseasonable delight, when we know he pass for an original. He writes it in the French could have given us a better, and more solid. He heroic verse, and calls it an heroic poem : his might have left that task to others, who, not subject is trivial, but his verse is noble. I doubt being able to put in thought, can only make us not but he had Virgil in his eye, for we find grin with the excrescence of a word of two or many admirable imitations of him, and some three syllables in the close. It is, indeed, below parodies; as particularly this passage in the fourth so great a master to make use of such a little of the Eneids: instrument. But his good sense is perpetually shining through all he writes; it affords us not the time of finding faults. We pass through the levity of his rhyme, and are immediately carried into some admirable useful thought. After all, he has chosen this kind of verse; and has written the best in it: and had he taken another, he would always have excelled. As we say of a court favourite, that whatsoever his office be, he still makes it uppermost, and most beneficial to himself.

Nec tibi Diva parens; generis nec Dardanus auctor,
Perfide; sed duris genuit te cautibus horrens
Caucasus; Hyrcanæque admôrunt ubera tigres.
Which he thus translates, keeping to the words,
but altering the sense:

Non, tou Pere a Paris, ne fut point Boulanger;
Et tu n'es point du sang de Gervais Horologer :
Ta Mere ne fut point la Maitresse d'un Coche;
Caucase dans ses flancs, te forma d'une Roche:
Une Tigresse affreuse, en quelque Antre écarté,
Te fit, avec son laict, succer sa Cruauté.

The quickness of your imagination, my lord, has already prevented me; and you know before, I And, as Virgil in his fourth Georgic of the Bees.

perpetually raises the lowness of his subject, by | Homer, whose age had not arrived to that fine

the loftiness of his words; and ennobles it by comparisons drawn from empires, and from monarchs.

Admiranda tibi levium spectacula rerum,

Magnanimosque Duces, totiusque ordine gentis
Mores & studia, & populos, & prælia dicam.
And again :

Sic Genuus immortale manent; multosque
per annos

ness, I found in him a true sublimity, lofty thoughts, which were clothed with admirable Grecisms, and ancient words, which he had been digging from the mines of Chaucer and Spenser, and which, with all their rusticity, had somewhat of venerable in them. But I found not there neither that for which I looked. At last I had recourse to his master, Spenser, the author of that immortal poem called The Fairy Queen; and there I met with that which I had been looking for so long in vain. Spenser had studied Virgil to as much advantage as Milton had done Homer; and among the rest of his excellencies had copied that. Looking farther into the Italian, I found Tasso had done the same; nay more, that all the sonnets in that language are on the turn of the first thought; which Mr. Walsh, in his late in

Stat fortuna domus, & avi numerantur avorum. We see Boileau pursuing him in the same flights; and scarcely yielding to his master. This, I think, my lord, to be the most beautiful, and most noble kind of satire. Here is the majesty of the heroic, finely mixed with the venom of the other; and raising the delight, which otherwise would be flat and vulgar, by the sublimity of the expression.genious preface to his poems, has observed. In I could say somewhat more of the delicacy of this and some other of his satires; but it might turn to his prejudice, if it were carried back to France.

short, Virgil and Ovid are the two principal fountains of them in Latin poem. And the French at this day are so fond of them, that they judge them to be the first beauties. Delicate & bien tourné, are the highest commendations which they bestow on somewhat which they think master-piece.

An example on the turn of words, amongst a thousand others, is that in the last book of Ovid's Metamorphoses :

Heu quantum scelus est, in viscera, viscera

condi!

Congestoqué avidum pinguescere corpore corpus;
Alteriusque, animantem animantis vivere leto!

I have given your lordship but this bare hint, in what manner this sort of satire may best be managed. Had I time, I could enlarge on the beautiful turns of words and thoughts; which are as requisite in this, as in heroic poetry itself; of which the satire is undoubtedly a species. With these beautiful turns 1 confess myself to have been unacquainted, till about twenty years ago, in a conversation which I had with that noble wit of Scotland, sir George Mackenzie: he asked me why I did not imitate in my verses the turns of An example on the turn both of thoughts and Mr. Waller and sir John Denham; of which he words is to be found in Catullus; in the complaint I had often read with of Ariadne, when she was left by Theseus: repeated many to me. pleasure, and with some profit, those two fathers Tum jam nulla viro juranti fœmina credat ; of our English poetry; but had not seriously Nulla viri speret sermones esse fideles: enough considered those beauties which give the Qui dum aliquid cupiens animus prægestit last perfection to their works. Some sprinklings of this kind I had also formerly in my plays; but But this they were casual, and not designed. hint, thus seasonably given me, first made me sensible of my own wants, and brought me afterwards to seek for the supply of them in other English authors. I looked over the darling of my youth, the famous Cowley; there I found, instead of them, the points of wit, and quirks of epigram, even in the Davideis, an heroic poem, which is of an opposite nature to those puerilities; but no elegant turns either on the word or on the thought. Then I consulted a greater genius (without offence to the manes of that noble author) I mean Milton; but as he endeavours every where to express

apisci,

Nil metuunt jurare; nihil promittere parcunt.
Sed simul ac cupidæ mentis satiata libido est,
Dicta nihil metuere; nihil perjuria curant.

An extraordinary turn upon the words, is that
in Ovid's Epistolæ Heroidum of Sappho to Phaon:
Si nisi quæ formâ poterit te digna videri,
Nulla futura tua est; nulla futura tua est.

Lastly, a turn which I cannot say is absolutely on words, for the thought turns with them, is in the fourth Georgic of Virgil; where Orpheus is to receive his wife from Hell, on express condition not to look on her till she was come on Earth :