d in the
weapons of rhetoric. But he is nevertheless a poet. Seized with
impressions, you see his sail caught with driving gusts, if his eye be on
the card. He snatches images right and left on his impetuous way, and
flings them forth suddenly and vividly, so that they always tell. Perhaps
he is more apt at binding a weighty thought in fewer words than his
Translator, who felt himself as this disadvantage when he expressively
portrayed the Latin as "a severe and compendious language." The Roman
satirist has more care of himself; he maintains a prouder step; and the
justifying incentive to this kind of poetry, hate with disdain of the
vices and miseries to be lashed, more possesses his bosom. And what a wild
insurrection of crimes and vices! What a challenge to hate and disdain in
the minds in which the tradition of the antique virtues, the old _mores_,
those edifiers of the sublime Republic, had yet life! Rome under Nero and
Domitian! Pedants have presumed to question the sincerity of his
indignation, and have more than hinted that his power of picturing those
enormous profligacies was inspired by the pleasure of a depraved
imagination. Never was there falser charge. The times and the topics were
not for delicate handling,--they were to be looked at boldly in the
face,--and if spoken of at all, at full, and with unmistakable words.

There is no gloating in his eyes when fixed in fire on guilt. Antipathy
and abhorrence load with more revolting colours the hideous visage, from
which, but for that moral purpose, they would recoil. But what, it may be
asked, is the worth and use of a satire that drags out vices from their
hiding-holes to flay them in sunshine? They had no hiding-holes. They
affronted the daylight. But the question must be answered more
comprehensively. The things told _are_--the corruption of our own spirit
has engendered them--and every great city, in one age or another, is a
Rome. Consult Cowper. To know such things is one bitter and offending
lesson in the knowledge of our nature. For the pure and simple such
records are not written. It is a galling disclosure, a frightful warning
for the anomalous race of the proud-impure. Gifford finely said of this
greatest of satirists, that, "disregarding the claims of a vain urbanity,
and fixing all his soul on the eternal distinctions of moral good and
evil, he laboured with a magnificence of language peculiar to himself to
set forth the loveliness of virtue, and t