His real defect was want of facility; and it is not improbable that, if prose had been considered a legitimate vehicle, he would have preferred pouring forth in that unrestricted form his indignant eloquence, rather than that, as Horace says, every verse should have cost him many scratchings of the head, and biting his nails to the quick. Whilst the criticism of Horace errs on the side of severity, that of Cicero[286] is somewhat too partial: firstly, because he himself was deficient in poetical facility; secondly, because in his time there were no models of perfection wherewith to compare the works of Lucilius. The judgment of Quintilian[287] is moderate; and although the taste for poetry was then corrupted by a love of quietness and rhetorical affectation, the praise is well merited which he bestows on the frank honesty and biting wit of the Satires of Lucilius. As he took the writers of old Attic comedy for his models, it cannot be a matter of surprise that he occasionally added force to his attacks on vice by coarseness and personality. Like them, if Lucilius found any one who deserved rebuke for his crimes, he did not trouble himself to make general remarks, and to attack vice in the abstract, but to illustrate his principles by living examples. The education of Lucilius had probably been desultory, and his course of study not sufficiently strict to give the rich young Roman knight the accurate training, the critical knowledge, necessary to make him a poet as well as a satirist. It had given him learning and erudition—it had furnished him with the wealth of two languages, both of which he used whenever he thought they supplied him with a two-edged weapon—but it had not sufficiently cultivated his ear and refined his taste. On the other hand, his Satires must have possessed nobler qualities than those of style. He was evidently a man of high moral principle, though stern and stoical, devotedly attached to the cause of virtue, a relentless enemy of vice and profligacy, a gallant and fearless defender of truth and honesty. He must have felt with Juvenal, “difficile est satiram non scribere.” He was under an obligation which he could not avoid. What cared he for correct tetrameters, or heroics, or senarii, so that he could crush effeminacy, and gluttony, and self-indulgence, and restore the standard of ancient morals, to which he looked back with admiration?