improvement; to Horace, Persius, and
Juvenal for its perfection. Horace has been
sufficiently described by Persius, in the
following passage, as translated by Dryden:

He, with a sly insinuating grace,
Laughed at his friend, and looked him in the face:
Would raise a blush, where secret vice he found,
And tickle while he gently probed the wound;
With seeming innocence the crowd beguiled.
And made the desperate passes when he smiled.

Persius was born the 4th of December,
in the year of Rome, 787, at Volaterroe, a
town in Etruria. At the age of twelve he
was removed to Rome, and pursued his
studies under Palsemon, the grammarian,
and Virginius Flaccus, the rhetorician. He
learned philosophy of Cornutus. The friend
of Pætus Thrasea and of Lucan, Persius is
said to have been a man of strict morals,
and also of extraordinary modesty. He is
famed for having been dutiful to his mother
and affectionate to his sister and other
relatives. The reading of Lucilius inclined
him to satire. He was but a youth when
he bgean to write, and he died in his twenty-
ninth year at a country-house in the Appian
Way, about eighteen miles from Rome. He
left his library to Cornutus. It consisted
of more than seven hundred volumes—no
mean collection for a young gentleman in
those days.

Persius, it seems, wrote seldom, and
confided the publication of his verses to his
friend Cæsius Bassus. His satires were
universally admired; nevertheless, he was
not equal either to Horace or Juvenal as a
poet, though superior to them in learning.
He aimed at a noble, figurative, and poetical
style; and the Stoic philosophy gave a
grandeur to his verse; but he is wanting
in wit, and sometimes in perspicuity. The
brevity of his style, in fact, often renders
him obscure, though, in some cases, he is
so only because of our ignorance of the
customs to which he alludes.

Of Juvenal, our information is more
copious. This severe and eloquent poet was
born at Aquinum, in Campania, about the
beginning of the reign of Claudius. His
father was a wealthy freedman, and gave
him a liberal education, placing him under
Fronto, the grammarian, and Quintilian,
who is supposed to have commended his
pupil's satires, in the remarks made by
him on Roman satire in general. He is
likewise commended by Martial, his friend,
in three epigrams. It is supposed that
Juvenal's satires were written late in life.
He had gained a fortune at the bar, where
he distinguished himself by his eloquence,
before he commenced the practice of poetry.

Hence it has been observed that he is a
declaimer in verse. He was more than
forty when ho made his first essay, which
he recited to his friends. Their approbation
encouraged him to a larger venture, in
which he severely exposed Paris, the
pantomimist, Domitian's chief favourite. The
minion complained to his imperial master,
who sent the offending poet into banishment,
under pretence of giving him the
prefecture of a cohort, about to be
quartered in Egypt. The poet benefited by his
new experience, and wrought up into his
fifteenth satire his observations on the
superstitions and religious controversies of
the people. Juvenal returned to Rome
after the death of Domitian. The fourth
satire, in which he exposes the debaucheries
and luxury of the tyrant's court, was
evidently written after that event. Juvenal
was at least seventy years of age when he
wrote his thirteenth satire, addressed to
his friend Calvinus, and was about eighty
when he died, in the eleventh year of the
reign of Adrian. In Juvenal, satire is said
to have arrived at its highest perfection.
There are passages in him worthy of the
Hebrew prophets. Always vehement, he
writes sometimes as if he were inspired.
Those in which he denounces polytheism
and superstition are magnificent.

The later poets of the Roman empire are
florid in their style, and have been
condemned by critics on that account as
inferior to their predecessors. Of these
Valerius Flaccus has left us part of a poem
on the Argonautic expedition. An imitator
of Virgil, he has not his taste and
judgment. In the substance of his work, he
follows Apollonius, the Greek poet; in the
form and structure of it, he is inferior even
to Lucan. As a new English poet has lately
treated the same subject in a long narrative
poem somewhat successfully, we now turn
to Valerius Flaccus with renewed interest,
since we can compare him with William
Morris, whose Life and Death of Jason
will not easily be forgotten.

A poet of about the same degree of merit
is Silius Italicus, the place of whose birth
is uncertain; the time was during the reign
of Tiberius. He had a genius for eloquence,
and was one of the best orators at
the bar, and by the favour of Vitellius rose
to high honours. Under Vespasian he was
sent pro-consul into Asia; on his return he
purchased Cicero's famous villa at
Tusculum, and an estate at Naples, which
is said to have been Virgil's. He lived to
a great age, but suffered much from an