Discourses on Satire and on Epic PoetryDryden, John
History
Discourses on Satire and on Epic Poetry
Dryden, John
Epic poetry; Satire; Satire -- History and criticism
understanding is to be informed in the other. There are blind sides and
follies even in the professors of moral philosophy, and there is not any
one sect of them that Horace has not exposed; which, as it was not the
design of Juvenal, who was wholly employed in lashing vices (some of them
the most enormous that can be imagined), so perhaps it was not so much
his talent.
“_Omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico_
_Tangit_, _et admissus circum præcordia ludit_.”
This was the commendation which Persius gave him; where by _vitium_ he
means those little vices which we call follies, the defects of human
understanding, or at most the peccadilloes of life, rather than the
tragical vices to which men are hurried by their unruly passions and
exorbitant desires. But in the word _omne_, which is universal, he
concludes with me that the divine wit of Horace left nothing untouched;
that he entered into the inmost recesses of nature; found out the
imperfections even of the most wise and grave, as well as of the common
people; discovering even in the great Trebatius (to whom he addresses the
first satire) his hunting after business and following the court, as well
as in the prosecutor Crispinus, his impertinence and importunity. It is
true, he exposes Crispinus openly as a common nuisance; but he rallies
the other, as a friend, more finely. The exhortations of Persius are
confined to noblemen, and the Stoic philosophy is that alone which he
recommends to them; Juvenal exhorts to particular virtues, as they are
opposed to those vices against which he declaims; but Horace laughs to
shame all follies, and insinuates virtue rather by familiar examples than
by the severity of precepts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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