see, to remain a joy for ever.  The great Venusian, as he informs us, set before himself the task of adapting the satire of Lucilius to the special circumstances, the manners, the literary modes and tastes of the Augustan age.  Horace’s Satires conform to Addison’s great rule, which he lays down in the Spectator, that the satire which only seeks to wound is as dangerous as arrows that fly in the dark.  There is always an ethical undercurrent running beneath the polished raillery and the good-natured satire.  His genial bonhomie prevents him from ever becoming ill-natured in his animadversions.

Of those manifold, kaleidoscopically-varied types of human nature which in the Augustan age flocked to Rome as the centre of the known world, he was a keen and a close observer.  Jealously he noted the deteriorating influence these foreign elements were exercising on the grand old Roman character, and some of the bitterest home-thrusts he ever delivered were directed against this alien invasion.[4] In those brilliant pictures wherewith his satires are replete, Horace finds a place for all.  Sometimes he criticises as a far-off observer, gazing with a sort of cynical amusement at this human raree-show; at others he speaks as though he himself were in the very midst of the bustling frivolity of the Roman Vanity Fair, and a sufferer from its follies.  Then his tone seems to deepen into a grave intensity of remonstrance, as he exposes its hollowness, its heartlessness, and its blindness to the absorbing problems of existence.

After the death of Horace (B.C. 8) no names of note occur in the domain of satire until we reach that famous trio, contemporary with one another, who adorned the concluding half of the first century of our era, viz.:—­Juvenal, Persius, and Martial.  They are severally representative of distinct modes or types of satire.  Juvenal illustrates rhetorical or tragic satire, of which he is at once the inventor and the most distinguished master—­that form of composition, in other words, which attacks vice, wrongs, or abuses in a high-pitched strain of impassioned, declamatory eloquence.  In this type of satire, evil is designedly painted in exaggerated colours, that disgust may more readily be aroused by the loathsomeness of the picture.  As a natural consequence, sobriety, moderation, and truth to nature no longer are esteemed so indispensable.  In this style Juvenal has had many imitators, but no superiors.  His satires represent the final development the form underwent in achieving the definite purpose of exposing and chastising in a systematic manner the entire catalogue of vices, public and private, which were assailing the welfare of the state.  They constitute luridly powerful pictures of a debased and shamelessly corrupt condition of society.  Keen contemptuous ridicule, a sardonic irony that held nothing in reverence, a caustic sarcasm that burned like an acid, and a vituperative invective that ransacked the language for phrases of opprobrium—­these were the agents enlisted by Juvenal into the service of purging society of its evil.