If Juvenal is to be ranked as a great moralist, it is not for his greatness and consistency as a thinker on moral questions. In the rhetorical exaggeration of the famous tenth satire, for instance, the highest energies of patriotism--the gallant and desperate defence of great causes, by sword or speech--are quoted as mere examples of disappointed ambition; and, in the indiscriminate condemnation of the arts by which men sought to gain a livelihood, he leaves no room for the legitimate pursuits of industry. His services to morals do not consist in any positive contributions to the notions of active duty, but in the strength with which he has realized and expressed the restraining influence of the old Roman and Italian ideal of character, and also of that religious conscience which was becoming a new power in the world. Though he disclaims any debt to philosophy (xiii. 121), yet he really owes more to the "Stoica dogmata," then prevalent, than he is aware of. But his highest and rarest literary quality is his power of painting characters, scenes, incidents and actions, whether from past history or from contemporary life. In this power, which is also the great power of Tacitus, he has few equals and perhaps no superior among ancient writers. The difference between Tacitus and Juvenal in power of representation is that the prose historian is more of an imaginative poet, the satirist more of a realist and a grotesque humorist. Juvenal can paint great historical pictures in all their detail--as in the famous representation of the fall of Sejanus; he can describe a character elaborately or hit it off with a single stroke. The picture drawn may be a caricature, or a misrepresentation of the fact--as that of the father of Demosthenes, "blear-eyed with the soot of the glowing mass," &c.--but it is, with rare exceptions, realistically conceived, and it is brought before us with the vivid touches of a Defoe or a Swift, or of the great pictorial satirist of the 18th century, Hogarth. Yet even in this, his most characteristic talent, his proneness to exaggeration, the attraction which coarse and repulsive images have for his mind, and the tendency to sacrifice general effect to minuteness of detail not infrequently mar his best effects.