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Other poems were of a lighter cast and intended to be sung to the accompaniment of the harp. These were the crowning scandal of his imperial vagaries in the eyes of patriotic Romans. "With our prince a fiddler," cries Juvenal, "what further disgrace remains?" King Lewis of Bavaria and some other great personages of our era would perhaps object to Juvenal's conclusion.
I remember when I once regretted to him that he had not given us more of Juvenal's Satires, he said he probably should give more, for he had them all in his head; by which I understood that he had the originals and correspondent allusions floating in his mind, which he could, when he pleased, embody and render permanent without much labour.
The same author's noble poem on the Vanity of Human Wishes is a more free, but equally spirited rendering of the tenth satire, which stands at the head of the later portion of Juvenal's work. In this, and in those of the subsequent satires which do not show traces of declining power, notably the eleventh and thirteenth, the rhetoric is less gaudy and the thought rises to a nobler tone.
Paraphrased by Johnson in The Vanity of Human Wishes, at the lines beginning: 'Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind, Obedient passions and a will resigned. Brocklesby sitting by me. He fell to repeating Juvenal's ninth satire; but I let him see that the province was mine. Piozzi Letters, ii. 274. Johnson, on his way to Scotland, 'changed horses, he wrote, 'at Darlington, where Mr.
The long, sallow visage, the goggle eyes, the huge under-jaw, which appeared not to open and shut by an act of volition, but to be dropped and hoisted up again by some complicated machinery within the inner man, the harsh and dissonant voice, and the screech-owl notes to which it was exalted when he was exhorted to pronounce more distinctly, all added fresh subject for mirth to the torn cloak and shattered shoe, which have afforded legitimate subjects of raillery against the poor scholar from Juvenal's time downward.
But we do take it hard, that the jovial Luther, in the midst of his ale and skittles, should have deliberately censured Juvenal's mens sana in corpore sano, as a pagan maxim! If Saint Luther fails us, where are the advocates of the body to look for comfort? Nothing this side of ancient Greece, we fear, will afford adequate examples of the union of saintly souls and strong bodies.
The old Greek tyrants loved her; great Rhamses seated her at his right hand; every prince had his singers. Now we dwell in an age of democracy, and Poetry wins but a feigned respect, more out of courtesy, and for old friendship's sake, than for liking. Though so many write verse, as in Juvenal's time, I doubt if many read it. "None but minstrels list of sonneting."
The great vigour of style, however, which is conspicuous in the seventh Satire makes it clear that it was not the work of the poet's old age. Hence the Caesar referred to cannot be Hadrian. He must, therefore, be some earlier emperor, and there can be little doubt it is Trajan. Under Trajan, then, we place the maturity of Juvenal's genius as it is displayed in the first ten Satires.
"Well, Juvenal's wisdom be yours, mine be Horace's!" rejoined Mauleverer, as he picked his teeth; "but I am glad you see the absolute necessity of keeping this secret from Lucy's suspicion. She never reads the papers, I suppose? Girls never do!"
The animals take no note of time. That is a good saying of Juvenal's, "He who owns the soil, owns up to the sky." So is this of Virgil's, "Command large fields, but cultivate small ones." Can there be any theory or doctrine not connected with our practical lives so absurd that it will not be accepted as true by many people?
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