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SATIRE I.

Argument.

DRYDEN will have this Satire to be the "ground-work of all the rest;" it rather seems, from several circumstances mentioned in it, to have been produced subsequent to most of them; and was probably drawn up after the Author had determined to collect and publish his works, as a kind of Introduction.

Even without this evidence, we might have concluded it to be written late in life, and by a man habituated to composition. Juvenal could not say with Hall,

"Stay till my beard shall sweep my aged breast,
"Then shall I seem an awful Satirist."

He had reached that period; and deriving dignity from years, and intrepidity from conscious rectitude, he announces himself with a tone of authority, which we neither feel inclined to doubt, nor to withstand.

He breaks silence with an impassioned complaint of the clamorous importunity of bad writers, and a humourous resolution of retaliating upon them, by turning author himself! He then ridicules the frivolous taste of his contemporaries in the choice of their subjects, intimating his own determination to devote himself wholly to Satire; to which he declares, with all the warmth of virtuous indignation, he is driven by the vices of the age.

He now exposes the corruption of the men, the profligacy of the women, the luxury of courtiers, the baseness of informers and fortune-hunters, the treachery of guardians, and the peculation of the officers of the state. Kindling with his theme, he warmly censures the general avidity for gaming, the servile rapacity of the mendicant patricians, the avarice and gluttony of the rich, and the miserable state of poverty and dejection in which they kept their followers and dependants. Finally, he makes some bitter reflections the danger of satirizing living villany, and concludes with a resolution to attack it, under the mask of departed names.

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SATIRE I.

v. 1-4.

WHAT! while with one eternal mouthing hoarse,
Codrus persists on my vex'd ear to force
His Theseid, must I, to my fate resign'd,
Hear, ONLY hear, and never pay in kind?

VER, 1. What! while with one eternal mouthing hoarse,] Before the invention of printing, authors had no shorter road to fame than public rehearsals. To procure full audiences for these, they had recourse to interest, solicitations, and, in case they were rich enough, to bribes.

This is mentioned as one of the plagues of Rome, so early as the time of Horace—auditum scripta relictis omnibus officiis; and Suetonius relates of Augustus, that he attended them with great patience and good humour. But the race of scribblers was prodigiously multiplied in Juvenal's days, and consequently, the grievance of following their rehearsals was more deeply felt. Pliny, good man! says he sacrificed months to them: our author, if we may judge from his manner, had sacrificed more. It appears, however, from a very picturesque passage in Pliny's letter to S. Senecio, that the general listlessness with which they were attended, was exceedingly great. After repeated invitations and delays, when the rehearser has now taken his station, and spread his book before him, and is on the point of beginning, "tum demum," says Pliny, "ac tunc quoque lente, cunctanterque veniunt, nec tamen permanent, sed ante finem recedunt; alii dissimulanter et furtim, alii simplicitur et liberè." Ep. xiii. lib. 1.

VER. 2. Codrus, &c.] Holyday supposes this to be the person who is mentioned again in the third Satire; and of whose goods and chattels so

Must this with farce and folly rack my head

Unpunish'd? that with sing-song, whine me dead?
Must Telephus, huge Telephus! at will

The day, unpunish'd, waste? or, huger still,
Orestes, with broad margin over-writ,

And back, and ....... O, ye gods! not finish'd yet?
Away-I know not my own house so well

As the trite, thread-bare themes, on which

ye dwell;

curious an inventory is there given. It may be so; and yet the valuables alluded to, would rather seem to have been collected by an antiquary, than a poet. Holyday adds, "he had nothing of a poet but the poverty:" he might, at least, have thrown in the pertinacity. What else he had cannot now be known, as his works are lost. The old scholiast tells us, that the Theseid (which so happily provoked our author to retaliate) was a tragedy: it was more probably an epic poem. The authors of Telephus and Orestes, have escaped the edge of ridicule; they are no where mentioned.

VER. 11. Away-I know not my own house so well, &c.] Hall has imitated this passage with some humour:

"No man his threshold better knows than I
"Brutes first arrival, and his victory,

"St George's sorrel, and his cross of blood,
"Arthur's round board, or Caledonian wood;

"But so to fill up books, both back and side,
"What boots it?" &c.

We have here a summary of the subjects which usually employed the wits of Rome; and certainly they could not be much more interesting to the readers of those times, than they are to us. Martial seems to have thought as meanly of them as our author; and in two very excellent epigrams, asserts the supe

rior usefulness of his own compositions; you mistake, says he, when you call

Mars' grove and Vulcan's cave!-How the Winds roar,
How ghosts are tortured on the Stygian shore,
How Jason stole the golden fleece, and how
The Centaurs fought on Othry's shaggy brow,
The walks of Fronto echo round and round;
(The columns trembling with the eternal sound,)
While high and low, as the mad fit invades,
Bellow the same dull nonsense through the shades.
I TOO CAN WRITE. ONCE, at a pedant's frown,

I pour'd my frothy fustian on the town,

my works trifles: the Supper of Tereus, the Flight of Dedalus, &c. &c. these are trifles: what I write "comes home to men's businesses, and bosoms"

et HOMINEM pagina nostra sapit!

The expedition to fetch, or, as Juvenal will have it, to steal, the golden fleece is a manifest allusion to the Argonauts of Valerius Flaccus. The poem is, by no means, a bad one; and yet he sneers at it again in this very Satire: but it was the triteness of the story which provoked his ridicule; to which, perhaps, may be added some little prejudice against the author, for his flattery of the Flavian family-a family which Juvenal hated; and to use an expression of Dr. Johnson's, he was a good hater !

VER. 17. The walks of Fronto, &c.] Juvenal returns to the charge. The unhappy men who could not procure an audience for their rehearsals, haunted the baths, forums, porticos, and other places of general resort, in order to fasten on the loiterers, and thus obtain a hearing. For this, no place was so well adapted as the house and gardens of Fronto (a nobleman of great learning and virtue), which were always open to the public, and exceedingly frequented.

The picture in the original is excellent: nor can the fancy easily conceive a more ludicrous scene, than the little groups collected by the eager poets, in various parts of the garden, and compelled to listen to the ravings which burst the pillars, and shook the statues from their pedestals.

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