Then he draws in his horns a little. Verse, of course, is not necessarily bad because it is popular only. But _Euge!_ and _Belle!_ are not the be-all and end-all of literature. What wretched stuff has not received them? How often have they not been consideration for a good dinner, and a cloak just a little torn! And what is even genuine popular judgment worth? Why do not poets adopt honest Roman subjects, instead of chattering about unreal Hellenics? And why do they affect such antiquated and unnatural style? What is the good of borrowing such stuff as “Ærumnis cor luctificabile fulta,” of ranging everything _in doctis figuris_, and of writing passages, such as two famous ones which he quotes, and which are traditionally asserted to be the work of Nero himself. He exhausts his images of scorn on these unlucky lines, and holds up _Arma virum_ against them as an example of natural knotty strength against effeminate drivel. And to a fresh protest of his friends about the danger of this kind of criticism, he replies by an ironical consent to declare it all very good, and a _coda_ of regret for the time when Lucilius used what freedom of speech he chose, when Horace laughed at everybody without giving offence, more seriously declaring that, whether he can publish or not, he will _write_ as the giants of the Old Comedy wrote. In this lively crabbed production there are two distinct strains or bents to note. All the best critics have for some time admitted that in professed satire generally, and in Roman satire more than in any other, there is, if not a touch of cant, at any rate a distinct convention of moral indignation—a sort of stock-part of bluff, honestly old-fashioned, censuring of modern corruption—which the satirist takes up as a matter of business. Even Martial, upon whom, Heaven knows! it sits oddly enough, though his consummate dexterity carries it off not ill, affects this now and then; it sometimes suggests itself even through the gloomy intensity of Juvenal; and though such a line as Persius’ famous “Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta” carries us far out of the dissenting-pulpiteer region where Seneca too often gesticulates, there is in this First Satire, at any rate, some suspicion of forced wrath, of the righteous overmuch.