greatness and value of both Juvenal and Tacitus is that they did not shut their eyes to the evil through which they had lived, but deeply resented it--the one with a vehement and burning passion, like the "saeva indignatio" of Swift, the other with perhaps even deeper but more restrained emotions of mingled scorn and sorrow, like the scorn and sorrow of Milton when "fallen on evil days and evil tongues." In one respect there is a difference. For Tacitus the prospect is not wholly cheerless, the detested tyranny was at an end, and its effects might disappear with a more beneficent rule. But the gloom of Juvenal's pessimism is unlighted by hope. A. C. Swinburne has suggested that the secret of Juvenal's concentrated power consisted in this, that he knew what he hated, and that what he did hate was despotism and democracy. But it would be hardly true to say that the animating motive of his satire was political. It is true that he finds the most typical examples of lust, cruelty, levity and weakness in the emperors and their wives--in Domitian, Otho, Nero, Claudius and Messalina. It is true also that he shares in the traditional idolatry of Brutus, that he strikes at Augustus in his mention of the "three disciples of Sulla," and that he has no word of recognition for what even Tacitus acknowledges as the beneficent rule of Trajan. So too his scorn for the Roman populace of his time, who cared only for their dole of bread and the public games, is unqualified. But it is only in connexion with its indirect effects that he seems to think of despotism; and he has no thought of democracy at all. It is not for the loss of liberty and of the senatorian rule that he chafes, but for the loss of the old national manliness and self-respect. This feeling explains his detestation of foreign manners and superstitions, his loathing not only of inhuman crimes and cruelties but even of the lesser derelictions from self-respect, his scorn of luxury and of art as ministering to luxury, his mockery of the poetry and of the stale and dilettante culture of his time, and perhaps, too, his indifference to the schools of philosophy and his readiness to identify all the professors of stoicism with the reserved and close-cropped puritans, who concealed the worst vices under an outward appearance of austerity. The great fault of his character, as it appears in his writings, is that he too exclusively indulged this mood. It is much more difficult to find what he loved and admired than what he hated. But it is characteristic of his strong nature that, where he does betray any sign of human sympathy or tenderness, it is for those who by their weakness and position are dependent on others for their protection--as for "the peasant boy with the little dog, his playfellow,"[5] or for "the home-sick lad from the Sabine highlands, who sighs for his mother whom he has not seen for a long time, and for the little hut and the familiar kids."[6]