ed his cause in or impartial court. Nay, we are very much
afraid, that if that gall-fed, parricidal ruffian, Archilochus, who
twisted his verses into a halter for noosing up his wife's father--a
melancholy event to which the old gentleman, it is said, lent a
helping-hand--were more to us than a tradition, we should be in danger of
finding in the poignancy of his iambics a sauce too much to our relish.
_Avec cette sauce_--cried the French gastronome, by the ecstasy of his
palate bewitched out of his moral discretion--_Avec cette sauce on
mangerait son pere!_

But leaving these imaginative heights, and walking along the level ground
of daily life, common sense, and sane criticism, we go on to assert that
private satire, lower than the highest, is intolerable. The grandeur of
moral indignation in Juvenal, never is altogether without a secret inkling
of disquietude at the bottom of the breast. It may be the Muse's
legitimate and imposed office to smite the offending city; but it is never
her joyous task. The judge never gladly puts on the black cap. The reality
oppresses us--we are sore and sick in the very breath of the contagion,
even if we escape untainted by it. The power of poetry possesses us for
the time, and we must submit. Perhaps it is right, if the Muse be a great
_magistra vitae_, that she should present life under all its aspects, and
school us in all its disciplines; and the direct, real, official censure
of manners may be a necessary part of her calling. But how differently
does the indirect censure affect us! Shakspeare creating Iago, censures
wily, treacherous, envious, malignant, cold-blooded villany, where and
whensoever to be found. He does not fix the brand upon the forehead of a
time, or of a profession, or of a man, or of a woman; but of a devil who
is incarnate in every time, who exercises every profession, is an innate,
is the householder rather, now in the steeled breast of a man, and now in
woman's softest bosom. This ubiquitous possibility of the Mark's
occurring--the ignorance of the archer where his gifted arrow will
strike--ennobles, aggrandizes his person and his work. It does not weaken
the service which the poet is called upon to render to humanity, by
showing himself the foe of her foes. And we, the spectators of the
drama--what is that strangely balanced and harmonized conflict of
emotions, by means of which we at once loathe and endure the poisonous
confidant of the Moor? From the depths