in seeking to substitute artistic proportion and literary finish for the desultory treatment and rough workmanship of his predecessor, he recognised the new conditions imposed by the change of the times and by his own position. The motives which actuated Lucilius in writing satire were public spirit and political passion. He was as much a combatant in the warfare of politics as if he had been a tribune or censor. The essential condition of the virtue' which he upheld by his incessant attacks on vice and corruption is public spirit—

Commoda praeterea patriae sibi prima putare.

The position secured to Lucilius by his birth, fortune, and intimacy with the best men in the State, and the republican freedom enjoyed in his time, enabled him to assail openly men in every grade of society and every sphere of political influence. In the stress which Horace lays on the relation of his predecessor to the writers of the old comedy, he indicates that his satire was primarily political, and that his most powerful weapon was direct personality-the boldness with which he stripped off the skin,

nitidus qua quisque per ora

Cederet, introrsum turpis.

From the whole field of political life-the greatest field for satire as for oratory-Horace was more absolutely debarred than any of the great satirists, ancient or modern. He found too, after his first experiment, that the temper of the society in which it was his ambition to live did not tolerate aggressive personalities on men of conspicuous station. The new satire, in so far as it was aggressive, had to limit itself to the field of social life, and to select its examples either from the notorious bores and nuisances of society, or from men of a past generation who had become notorious for their meanness or their prodigality. In so far as his satire is aggressive, it is limited to the general aspect of social life. And it is chiefly two extreme types of social life-the miser and usurer, Ummidius, Avidienus or Fufidius, and the roué and prodigal in his various gradations from the 'scurra Volanerius' to the son of Aesopus

and the two sons of Arrius-that he has preserved from oblivion. Avarice and luxury are the chief offences denounced by him and exposed through living examples. These are the excesses

which a prosperous and unrefined middle-class presents to a spectator regarding its members from the 'templa serena' of a polished' and cultivated social circle. So far as his satire is aggressive his field is thus much more limited than that of either Lucilius or Juvenal.

The spirit in which Horace uses his satiric pen is different from that attributed to Lucilius and apparent in every line of Juvenal. Two opposite characteristics are attributed to Lucilius. All who speak of him agree in ascribing to him the greatest boldness and freedom of speech. But while to Horace and Cicero his urbanity and wit appear his chief qualities' comis et urbanus' are the epithets applied to him by Horace, 'doctus et perurbanus' by Cicero-the fierceness of his indignation, the bitterness and vehemence of his invective, are those which attracted the satirists of the Empire to him. The fragments of Lucilius justify both views of his character. His spirit was as far as possible removed from that of a cynic, an ascetic, or a misanthrope. He appears to have been a man of the world, enjoying his life in manifold ways, laughing heartily at the follies of his contemporaries and not sparing his own, a genuine humourist not without a strong Rabelaisian vein in him. But he was also a man of great public spirit, a warm friend and a warm hater; the last more on public than on private and personal grounds. Patriotism, the basis of virtue, required him to be the enemy of bad men and bad morals

Hostem esse atque inimicum hominum morumque malorum

as well as to be the champion of the men and the morals through which the good of the State was promoted. His combative temper and keenness of intellect fitted him well for the part he had to play in the political and social warfare, so actively waged during the last thirty years of the second century B. C.

With this side of Lucilius the spirit of Juvenal was in thorough sympathy. Patriotism was to him too the basis of virtue; and his worst enemies would not refuse to him the title of a good hater. What roused his indignation to the utmost was the degeneracy from the old national standard of manliness and morality; and the men whom he most hated were the tyrant and his ministers to whose rule and influence he attributed much of this degeneracy. Horace had no such consuming passion. His Odes show that at a later time he was not wanting in the patriotism and public spirit evoked by the new Empire, and that he too cherished an ideal of the old national virtues. But at the time when the Satires were written there was no public virtue to which he could have appealed. The cause of the Republic, with which whatever remained of the old national spirit seemed to have been identified, was lost. The task which was left to the satirist was to make social life more pleasant, and the life of the individual more rational. The part which Horace had to perform was much the same as that which Macaulay attributes to Addison, in a time not unlike the early Augustan age, when a state of settled order and social respectability was beginning to succeed a time of revolution and of moral license. It was natural that he should find his relation to Lucilius, not in the vehemence and freedom of his invective, but in his irony, his knowledge of the world, and his tact in dealing with it.

But with another side of Lucilius Horace was more in sympathy than any other ancient writer. The satire of Lucilius, besides being aggressively critical on individuals and classes, was largely autobiographical. How this element was combined with the other elements in his satire must be matter of conjecture. It was probably, like the same element in Horace, partly fused through his general comments on the world, and partly the subject of separate episodes. His satire sometimes took the form of a narrative of adventures in which he had taken part, and a description of scenes of which he was a spectator. This, one of the original functions of satire, disappears from the type which it ultimately assumes in Juvenal. Scarcely any Roman

writer tells us so little of himself, and is personally so much of an enigma, as the great satirist of the Empire. This personal element is the chief charm in the satire of Horace, as the relation established with the reader, by a real or assumed personality, is one of the greatest charms of the Spectator. It is through his social tact that Horace exercises a moral influence over others. He wants his reader to be in sympathy with him, and makes himself known to him in his habits and circumstances, thoughts and feelings, with good sense, good taste, perfect candour, and full reliance on being met with equal candour. As pure satirists, as masters of satiric invective or irony, others in ancient and modern times may claim a higher rank than Horace. They have written with more of passion and of the power imparted by passion, or with a more penetrating insight into the abysses of human nature. But Horace ranks among the foremost of those writers who have left a true record and picture of themselves to after times. Others have gained a permanent place in literature by the vivid memorials they have left, in the form of confessions, of the inward tragedy of their lives. Horace among the ancients, as Montaigne among the moderns, has made the record of his habitual moods profoundly interesting by the absolute candour and the self-knowledge of his revelation. He has done this also largely in his Odes and Epistles, yet it is to the Satires that we turn as our fullest and most authentic source of information about his actual life and habits. In the Odes we know him in the hours of inspiration; in the Epistles in his deeper thoughts and in his inner life; in the Satires in his daily life and habitual intercourse with men.

As in the Odes and Epistles, so too in the Satires, though he is there less formally didactic, Horace is a moralist. His work is positive as well as negative. His positive aim is to induce men to guide their lives by reason and common sense, to be consistent, to avoid extremes, and to be masters of their appetites. A definite purpose in life, and moderate wants, are the secret of contentment. But a man has to be not only at peace with himself, but on good terms with society-' dulcis amicis.' And nowhere is Horace

more admirable than in inculcating charitable indulgence to the faults of our friends and courage in defending them. Nowhere is his satire more penetrating than in his exposure of the arts of slandering and backbiting. And while he directly inculcates the more serious duties of friendship, he indirectly, by the living representation of impudence and self-assertion, and the urbanity with which they are met, inculcates the minor duties of good manners in social intercourse.

One pervading quality of all Horace's satiric writing-of his reproof, his sketches of character, his narrative, his self-delineation, his positive teaching-is its truth and moderation. This is a ground of superiority over Juvenal and most satirists, ancient or modern. It is another point of resemblance between him and Addison. It was probably the recognition of a similar moderation and sobriety of treatment in the great master of irony and urbanity before his day, which explains the attraction that drew Horace to the comedies of Terence. Nowhere is the absence of these qualities more conspicuous than in Horace's great imitator Persius; and the contrast between the two satirists is especially marked in those passages in which the disciple has tried to improve on his master. This sobriety and truth to. nature are especially admirable in his sketches of character. Roman society presented more extreme types of manners and character than modern society. But even such sketches as those of Avidienus, pouring his rancid oil drop by drop over his cabbage; of Tigellius praising the virtues of plain living and spending a million sesterces in a week; of Priscus, one day a rake in Rome, another a scholar in Athens; of the young prodigal, on the day of his accession to his fortune, summoning a council of the ministers of his extravagance, do not seem forced or caricatured. Often by a single trait, as that of the 'scurra Volanerius,' broken down by well-earned gout in the hands, and hiring a man to put the dice into the box for him, he suggests a whole career. If we have few elaborate and complete portraits such as those we find in Juvenal and Martial, we have suggestive glimpses of a great number of individuals and