Peleus here, and Cadmus reign.
Here great Achilles, wrathful now no more,
Since his blest mother (who before
Had try'd it on his body in vain)
Dipt now his soul in Stygian lake,
Which did from thence a divine hardness take,
That does from passion and from vice invulnerable make."

Carey's commencement is dull--his close is good--but the whole will never,
on this earth, be gotten by heart. Cowley's conceits are cruel in Pindar's
case--yet, in spite of them, there is a strange sublimity in the
strain--at the end moral grandeur. Reginald Heber and Abraham
Moore--especially Reginald--excel Carey; but Pindar in English is reserved
for another age.

Dryden dashed at every poet--Theocritus, Lucretius, Persius, Horace,
Juvenal, Ovid, Virgil, Homer--each in his turn unhesitatingly doth he take
into his translating hands. In his Essay on Satire, he compares with one
another the three Roman Satirists; but though he draws their characters
with his usual force and freedom of touch, they are not finely
distinctive--if coloured _con amore_, yet without due consideration. In
the Preface to the Second Miscellany, he says of Horace's Satires, that
they "are incomparably beyond Juvenal's, if to laugh and rally is to be
preferred to raillery and declaiming." In his Essay, he says, "In my
particular opinion, Juvenal is the more delightful writer." And
again--"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. * * * His thoughts are sharper; his indignation against vice 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 temporizing poet, a
well-manner'd court-slave, and a man who is often afraid of laughing in
the right place, who is ever decent because he is naturally servile_." Is
this Quintus Horatius Flaccus!

In Dryden and Juvenal are met peer and peer. Indignant scorn and moral
disgust instigated the nervous hand of Juvenal, moulded to wield the
scourge of satire. He is an orator in verse, speaking with power and
command, skilled in the strength of the Roman speech, and practise