For Him, when stretch'd upon his honour'd bier,
The grateful matrons shed the pious tear,
While, with stern eye, the patriot and the sire,
Saw, by the axe, the high-born pair expire:
They fell-just victims to the offended laws,
And the first sacrifice to FREEDOM'S cause!

For me, who nought but innate worth admire,
I'd rather vile Thersites were thy sire,
So thou wert like Achilles, and couldst wield
Vulcanian arms, the terrour of the field,
Than that Achilles should thy father be,
And, in his offspring, vile Thersites see.

And yet, how high soe'er thy pride may trace

The long-forgotten founders of thy race,
Still must the search with that Asylum end,
From whose polluted source we all descend.
Haste then, the inquiry haste; secure to find
Thy sire some vagrant slave, some bankrupt hind,
Some-but I mark the kindling glow of shame,
And will not shock thee with a baser name.

SATIRE IX.

Argument.

No part of Juvenal's works has given such offence as this Satire; in which he is accused of speaking too openly of that most execrable practice, in which the ancients, to their eternal shame, so universally indulged.

Vice, as Pope has well observed,

"Vice is a monster of so foul a mien,

"That to be hated, needs but to be seen;"

but we fear to strip her, and thus conceal half her enormity. Juvenal had no such apprehensions: he, therefore, exhibits her in all the deformity of nakedness, and the spectacle strikes us with disgust and horrour. Far from him was the idea of corrupting the heart, of inflaming the passions, by a partial exposure of the profligacy which he censures: no, his aim was direct, and his immediate purpose, to impress the minds of others with the same loathing he himself felt for a crime, which to name is to execrate.

This is no place to enter into the disputes respecting the propriety of his object; granting it, however, to be legitimate, he will be universally allowed to have pursued it with no ordinary degree of dexterity

and success.

The Satire consists of a dialogue between himself and one Nævolus, an enfranchised slave; a poor wretch, who, from a kind of jester or dabbler in small wit for a meal, had become what is called a man of pleasure; and thence by a regular gradation, a dependent of some wealthy debauchee, (here named Virro,) who made him subservient to his unnatural passions; and in return, starved, insulted, hated, despised, and discarded him! This miserable object Juvenal rallies with infinite spirit, on his disconsolate appearance; and, by an affected of his infamous life. The gravity with which this is done constitutes, in the opinion of Gibbon, the whole pleasantry of the Satire. Pleasantry is not the word. There is a loathsomeness in Nævolus's part of the dialogue, which, though admirably calculated for the end our author had in view, never yet excited one agreeable sensation; and, in that of Juvenal, a vein of keen and sarcastick ridicule, which may induce us to share his indignation, but cannot create mirth. This, however, is far from being the only merit of the piece; it has many beautiful and many moral passages, exclusive of the grand and important lesson, which, whether Juvenal meant it or not, it is our duty to gather from it; that a life of sin is a life of slavery, and that those who embrace it for the sake of Profit, are deluded in their expectations from day to day, till in age they sigh to be emancipated from that state of misery which they voluntarily adopted, and from which, while they view it with eyes of anguish and despair, they have no longer strength or resolution to fly: therefore, in the words of Divine Wisdom, "they shall eat of the fruits of their own way, and be filled with their own devices."

SATIRE IX.

JUVENAL, NÆVOLUS.

V. 1-8.

JUN. STILL drooping, Nævolus! What, prithee, say,
Portends this show of grief from day to day,
This copy of flay'd Marsyas? what dost thou
With such a rueful face, and such a brow,
As Ravola wore, when caught-Not so cast down,
Look'd Pollio, when, of late, he scour'd the town,
And, proffering treble rate, from friend to friend,
Found none so foolish, none so mad, to lend !

VER. 3. This copy of flay'd Marsyas?] The story of Marsyas, who was overcome by Apollo in a musical contest, and afterwards flayed alive by him for his presumption, is known to every school-boy. Juvenal here alludes to a celebrated statue of this baffled champion, which stood in the Forum; so that the comparison must have been sufficiently striking.

VER. 6. Pollio, &c.] We find this liberal-hearted gentleman again in the eleventh Satire; but his circumstances do not seem to have improved in the interval, for he is there reduced to pawn his last article of value for a dinner.