he deformity and horror of vice,
in full and perfect display." The loveliness of virtue! Ay, in many a
picture of the innocence and simplicity of the olden time--unelaborate but
truthful--ever and anon presented for a few moments to show how happy
humanity is in its goodness, and how its wickedness is degradation and
misery. And there are many prolonged lofty strains sounding the praise of
victorious virtue. They are for all time--and they, too, that magnify and
glorify the spirit of liberty, then exiled from the city it had built, and
never more to have dominion there, but regnant now in nations that know
how to prize the genius it still continued to inspire when public virtue
was dead.

Yet Dryden has not been altogether successful with Juvenal. In many places
he is most slovenly--in many elaborately coarse beyond the coarseness
ready-made to his hand--in some of the great passages, he leaves out what
he feared to equal, and, in the face of all the principles in his own
creed on Translation, he often paraphrases with all possible effrontery,
and lets himself loose to what is called imitation, till the original
evanishes, to return, however, on a sudden, apparition-like, and with a
voice of power, giving assurance of the real Juvenal.

His criticism on Lucretius is characteristic of them both. See how rashly,
we had almost said foolishly, he rates the Epicurean for his belief in the
mortality of the soul. Were there no better reason afforded by the light
of nature, for a belief in its immortality than what Dryden throws out,
human nature would not so earnestly have embraced, and so profoundly felt,
and so clearly seen, the truth of the Christian dispensation.

"If he was not of the best age of Roman poetry, he was at least of
that which preceded it; and he himself refined it to that degree of
perfection, both in the language and the thoughts, that he left an
easy task to Virgil; who as he succeeded him in time, so he copied
his excellences; for the method of the Georgics is plainly derived
from him. Lucretius had chosen a subject naturally crabbed; he,
therefore, adorned it with poetical descriptions, and precepts of
morality, in the beginning and ending of his books, which you see
Virgil has imitated with great success in those four books, which, in
my opinion, are more perfect in their kind than even his divine
AEneid. The turn of his verses he has likewise foll