public resort, or he might get the loan of a room from a wealthy patron, or he might wait to be asked at a private party. The contempt with which Juvenal alludes to the public reciter, the bitterness with which he speaks of dependence upon a patron for the mere use of a hall, are slight reasons for supposing that he addressed select audiences, invited probably by circular, and meeting under a roof. There is evidence that recitations were very frequent in Rome, and that the necessity of attending them was felt to be a grave social infliction. Pliny, who mentions on one occasion that there had been public readings every day in the month of April, lets us know that a great many hearers went reluctantly and did not stay out the reading, and apologises on another occasion for going himself, on the ground that he was repaying a friend for attentions of the same kind. Pliny, however, records also that during a time of political liberty, probably under Nerva or Trajan, recitations became popular, and men were found to recite three days running, and could get audiences to listen to them, not, he remarks, because there is more eloquence than there used to be, but because it is possible to write with greater freedom, and so with greater pleasure to oneself. Juvenal's Satires-teeming with allusions that would be caught up in a moment, and breathing the spirit of aristocratic feeling as it lingered in the best sets-are precisely the kind of literature that would be fashionable in such breathing-times as Pliny describes.

A poem written for recitation must, from the nature of the case, differ from a poem that is written to be read. It must be absolutely transparent. The reader may pause and think till he has mastered a subtle allusion or comprehended a deep thought more fully; the hearer is justly impatient if he loses the thread of an argument and cannot recover it. Juvenal's very style is direct. When he is not making positive statements, every point of which may be concluded in two or three lines, he is either ejaculating or asking questions. Lest a point should be missed he repeats it, and accumulates illustration upon illustration. Like almost every trained public speaker, he will sooner have a faulty construction than fail to call up a complete image before the eye. In the first Satire, lines 40 and 41, beginning 'unciolam Proculeius habet,' and part of lines 60 and 61, beginning at 'nam lora tenebat,' are

parentheses which offend the taste as we read them. Juvenal was probably right in judging that the want of the 'callida junctura' would not be perceived by a mixed audience, and that every fresh epigram added life and sparkle to his declamation. Latterly this vice of amplification grew upon him. In the thirteenth Satire he compares the prodigy of an honest man to (1) a boy, or (2) fishes turned up by the plough, or (3) to a mule that foals, or (4) to a shower of stones, or (5) to a swarm of bees pendant, or (6) to a river of milk. It is probable, as I have suggested above, that in some of these cases the lines were used interchangeably, so that the jaded sense of an accustomed audience might be quickened by novelty. The fault, however, belongs to the very texture of Juvenal's work. He had to write down to the level of what was after all a fashionable mob, in spite of its training in Greek literature and its political interests; and he could not trust himself to convey a simple thought in the adequacy of a simple expression.

There was another alternative to the arts of rhetoric. A poet might renounce the sense of proportion, and trust, like Lucan, to conceits that have the flavour of genius or, like Statius, to what Mr. Merivale has called 'the exquisite finish of successive periods.' The result, as we know, is that it is difficult to find a really weak line in the Pharsalia or the Thebais, and impossible to call either a great poem. There is the vice of unreality about both; obscure machinery, turgid metaphors, or the cultivated commonplace of poetic diction. Reading either poem we seem to understand why it was so possible to admire them unreservedly. As the faultless lines were rolled off one by one, they filled the room with a very grateful aroma of flowers from the tomb of Vergil. The right god interposed in the right place; the heroes fought like Achilles or Aeneas; the appropriate epithets for every supernatural power and every passion had been so happily varied, that the mind was never perplexed by novelty and never wearied by remembrance. Juvenal has not disdained a little of this art of literary mosaic. Here and there with a master's touch he interweaves a line or a word that recalls a Roman classic1. More often still he gives us a line or two of

See for instance Satire vii. 11. 58, 62, and 66, referred by Mr. Lewis, I think rightly, to passages in Ovid, Horace, and Vergil.

heroic warmth, or calls up an idyll of country life, as if to show that he was poet as well as satirist. Habitually, however, he was careless of language for its own sake and of the prettinesses of language. It is his thought that makes his style and that determined his choice of a subject. It was his supreme merit to understand that the Aeneid-itself the result of learning and reflection rather than a poem of natural growth-was an experiment that could not be reproduced. Not caring to turn out literary rococo, and wishing to speak directly to the great world, he decided to talk of what the great world really cared about ; the last scandal, the state of the times, the decay of the patrician order. He had to find the secret of attracting and keeping crowds together, in his vigour, his pungency, and in the skill with which he called up thoughts that it would have been dangerous to utter aloud, or that appealed to a vein of latent scepticism. Take the fifth Satire. It is imitated from Horace, and on the whole a dull one, but it is easy to note the places at which a tremour would have run through the listening crowd: the allusion to the wine which Thrasea and Helvidius used to drink garlanded; the comparison of the mushroom to that by which Claudius was poisoned; the mocking simile of Auster drying his wet wings in his dungeon-cave. Take again those often misunderstood lines of the first Satire, where the poet asks, 'whence are we to get back our fathers' old simplicity, whose name I do not dare to pronounce?' Is it difficult to understand how men just emancipated from a despotism would thrill as the word indicated by 'simplicitas'-the word which it had been dangerous to pronounce, 'libertas '-rose instinctively to every lip?

The danger of the rhetorical style is that in the hands of an inferior artist it becomes overloaded with ornament and excludes simplicity. The orator is alarmed lest he should seem to be putting cloth of gold upon cloth of frieze, and falls into the more perilous error of stringing together a collection of purple patches. A great public speaker avoids this by making his narrative or argumentative parts strong in a severe concision, and only now and again rising, as if under protest, to the point at which passion is appealed to. Juvenal not unfrequently is the first to laugh at his own vehemence. He recapitulates all the infamies of Rome, and says that indignation

inspires verses, such as I can write-or Cluvienus.' He turns from a vigorous apostrophe, recapitulating what the plebeian Decii and Numa had done, to a pithy suggestion that every patrician is descended from a shepherd or a felon. The noble burst with which the second Satire concludes is carried on with undiminished fire and elevation, till the poet arrives at the sentiment that the conquered nations have a severer morality than the conquerors. At that point it may well be that Juvenal was embarrassed by his own success. To complete the passage without declining into a platitude might seem as difficult as it has proved for modern art to determine how the missing arms of the Venus of Melos ought to be restored. Accordingly the satirist drops at once into a cynical sneer at a single degrading episode of contemporary scandal. It is noticeable that in the third and tenth Satires, which have been very carefully finished, this artifice is never employed, and it is less and less general in the later poems. There is an exception in the thirteenth Satire, where a fine picture of the bad man's questionings whether he may not risk offending the gods, since their mills grind slowly, is succeeded by a grotesque picture of the despoiled man's wrath and of the complaints hurled at heaven for its ineffectual justice. On the whole, the third Satire, with its equable flow and serene dignity, may be regarded as marking the highest level which Juvenal attained, and its success may seem conclusive against the rapid transitions of the other early Satires. It must be borne in mind, however, that as a rule the pieces first in order are superior to those which are supposed to be later in time, and the precise faults charged against these, a turgid declamatory diction and a stilted morality, may reasonably be held referable to the difficulties of keeping the style always intense.

The better side of eloquence comes out now and again when Juvenal animates a tame thought with a spirited apostrophe or a vivid illustration. Nothing can be more correct or unimpassioned than the sentiment that the tutor ought to take the place of the parent. In Juvenal's hands it is prefaced by two exquisite lines, wishing the wise ancestors who introduced the practice a light grave and fragrant daffodils and deathless spring in their urns. It is followed up by a playful image of Achilles shrinking from the rod under the care of a long-tailed

centaur. The vanity of life is a commonplace of the moralist, but was it ever condensed with such incisive strength as in the words of Naevolus, 'While we drink, while we call for garlands and perfumes and girls, old age is creeping up and we see it not '? Or again, were the lamentations of the jaded voluptuary ever more scornfully thrown back than in Juvenal's reply: 'Do not be afraid, as long as these hills stand you will never want a patron to employ profligacy?' Horace would have ended the fourth Satire with the breaking up of the council, whose members have deliberated over the best method of dishing up a turbot, as if it had been a question of saving Rome when the Sigambrian was outside the gates. Juvenal has his moral lesson to enforce, his rhetorical point to make, his high-born audience to please. After all, were not these trifles, he asks, better than the day when the tyrant plotted murders that remained unavenged as long as only the best blood of Rome flowed, and till all others trembled ?

Supremely artistic by observation and in the choice of words, Juvenal had the quick eye of the sportsman and the soldier, and an instinct for using picturesque images and lines in which the sound is an echo to the sense. How many men of those days felt, as he did, that something of a divine presence had disappeared when the bubbling spring was walled about with marble instead of being left to its native sandstone and green turf? How many other men would have noticed the twittering of storks in the Temple of Concord, or would have thought of a garret as the place where pigeons built, or would have lingered over the picture of a country child hiding its face in its mother's lap as the actor grins through a whited mask, or would have understood the secret yearnings of the country boy to see once more his mother and the cottage home and the goats playing round it? When Persius wants to make the picture of death vivid, he gives us a medical description of the muddy complexion, the sluggish digestion, the convulsions that come on at meal time, the chattering teeth, and the morsel falling back untasted, till in due time he brings us to the dead man lying out anointed and with his feet pointed stiffly to the door. Juvenal scarcely pauses over the accident that crushes the plebeian out of life and recognition, but he calls up image after image of the household washing the dishes and blowing up the fire and pre