ing, I am to say another word, which, as true as it is, will yet displease the partial admirers of our Horace. I have hinted it before; but it is time for me now to speak more plainly.

This manner of Horace is indeed the best; but Horace has not executed it altogether so happily, at least not often. The manner of Juvenal is confessed to be inferiour to the former; but Juvenal has excelled him in his performance. Juvenal has railed more wittily than Horace has rallied. Horace means to make his reader laugh; but he is not sure of his experiment. Juvenal always intends to move your indignation; and he always brings about his purpose. Horace, for aught I know, might have tickled the people of his age; but amongst the moderns he is not so successful. They who say-he entertains so pleasantly, may perhaps value themselves on the quickness of their own understandings, that they can see a jest farther off than other men: they may find occasion of laughter in the wit-battle of the two buffoons, Sarmentus and Cicerrus; and hold their sides for fear of bursting, when Rupilius and Persius are scolding. For my own part, I can only like the characters of all four, which are judiciously given; but for my heart I cannot so much as smile at their insipid raillery. I see not why Persius should call upon Brutus, to revenge him on his adversary; and that because he had killed Julius Cæsar, for

'HOR. 1. 1. sat. v.-vii.

VOL. III.

endeavouring to be a King, therefore he should be desired to murder Rupilius, only because his name was Mr. King. A miserable clench, in my opinion, for Horace to record: I have heard honest Mr. Swan' make many a better, and yet have had the grace to hold my countenance. But it may be, puns were then in fashion, as they were wit in the sermons of the last age, and in the court of King Charles the Second. I am sorry to say it, for the sake of Horace; but certain it is, he has no fine palate, wha con fool

2 Of" honest Mr. Swan," who doubtless is well known to all proficients in the Ars Punica, I have not found any other memorial than what the present passage affords.

3 In his edition of Juvenal and Persius, printed at Paris in 12mo, 1616.

& Bennie's little vrt. of Lether. & Miscors- & Sicht. Im Swan_

Persius, the difficulty is to find a meaning; in Juvenal, to choose a meaning: so crabbed is Persius, and so copious is Juvenal; so much the understanding is employed in one, and so much the judgment in the other; so difficult is it to find any sense in the former, and the best sense of the latter.

If, on the other side, any one suppose I have commended Horace below his merit, when I have allowed him but the second place, I desire him to consider, if Juvenal, a man of excellent natural endowments, besides the advantages of diligence and study, and coming after him, and building upon his foundations, might not probably, with all these helps, surpass him; and whether it be any dishonour to Horace, to be thus surpassed, since no art or science is at once begun and perfected, but, that it must pass first through many hands, and even through several ages. If Lucilius could add to Ennius, and Horace to Lucilius, why, without any diminution to the fame of Horace, might not Juvenal give the last perfection to that work? Or rather, what disreputation is it to Horace, that Juvenal excels in the tragical satire, as Horace does in the comical? I have read over attentively both Heinsius and Dacier, in their commendations of Horace; but I can find no more in either of them, for the preference of him to Juvenal, than the instructive part; the part of wisdom, and not that of pleasure; which therefore is here allowed him, notwithstanding what Scaliger and Rigaltius have pleaded to the contrary for Juvenal. And to

shew I am impartial, I will here translate what Dacier has said on that subject.

"I cannot give a more just idea of the two books of Satires made by Horace, than by comparing them to the statues of the Sileni, to which Alcibiades compares Socrates, in the Symposium. They were figures, which had nothing of agreeable, nothing of beauty on their outside; but when any one took the pains to open them, and search into them, he there found the figures of all the deities. So, in the shape that Horace presents himself to us, in his Satires, we see nothing at the first view which deserves our attention: it seems that he is rather an amusement for children, than for the serious consideration of men. But when we take away his crust, and that which hides him from our sight, when we discover him to the bottom, then we find all the divinities in a full assembly; that is to say, all the virtues which ought to be the continual exercise of those, who seriously endeavour to correct their vices."

It is easy to observe, that Dacier, in this noble similitude, has confined the praise of his author wholly to the instructive part: the commendation turns on this, and so does that which follows.

"In these two books of satire, it is the business of Horace to instruct us how to combat our vices, to regulate our passions, to follow nature, to give bounds to our desires, to distinguish betwixt truth and falsehood, and betwixt our conceptions of things, and things themselves; to come back from our prejudicate opinions, to understand exactly

the principles and motives of all our actions; and to avoid the ridicule into which all men necessarily fall, who are intoxicated with those notions which they have received from their masters; and which they obstinately retain, without examining whether or no they be founded on right reason.

"In a word, he labours to render us happy in relation to ourselves, agreeable and faithful to our friends, and discreet, serviceable, and well-bred, in relation to those with whom we are obliged to live and to converse. To make his figures intelligible, to conduct his readers through the labyrinth of some perplexed sentence or obscure parenthesis, is no great matter; and, as Epictetus says, there is nothing of beauty in all this, or what is worthy of a prudent man. The principal business, and which is of most importance to us, is to shew the use, the reason, and the proof of his precepts.

"They who endeavour not to correct themselves according to so exact a model, are just like the patients who have open before them a book of admirable receipts for their diseases, and please themselves with reading it, without comprehending the nature of the remedies, or how to apply them to their cure."

Let Horace go

off with these encomiums, which he has so well deserved.

To conclude the contention betwixt our three poets, I will use the words of Virgil, in his fifth Encid, where Æneas proposes the rewards of the