What human kind desires and what they shun, Rage, passion, pleasure, impotence of will, Shall this satirical collection fill. DRYDEN. Never was vice so rampant; luxury has become monstrous; the rich lord lives in pampered and selfish ease, while those poor mortals, his clients, jostle together to receive the paltry dole of the _sportula_; that is all the help they will get from their patron: No age can go beyond us; future times Can add no further to the present crimes. Our sons but the same things can wish and do; Vice is at stand and at the highest flow. Thou, Satire, spread thy sails, take all the winds that blow.[717] And yet the satirist must be cautious; the days are past when a Lucilius could lash Rome at his will: When Lucilius brandishes his pen And flashes in the face of guilty men, A cold sweat stands in drops on every part, And rage succeeds to tears, revenge to smart. Muse, be advised; 'tis past considering time, When entered once the dangerous lists of rhyme; Since none the living villains dare implead, Arraign them in the persons of the dead.[718] No better preface has ever been written; it gives a perfect summary of the motives, the objects, and the methods of the poet's work in language which for vigour and brilliance he never surpassed. The closing lines show us his literary parentage. It is Lucilius who inspires him; it is the fierce invective of the father of Roman satire that appeals to him. Lucilius had scourged Rome, when the inroads of Hellenism and oriental luxury, the fruits of foreign conquest, were beginning to make themselves felt. To Juvenal it falls to denounce the triumph of these corroding influences. He has nothing of the almost pathetic philosophic detachment of Persius, nor of the easy-going compromise of Horace. He does not palter with problems of right and wrong, nor hesitate over his moral judgements; casuistry is wholly alien to his temper. It is indignation makes the verse, and from this fact, together with his rhetorical training, his chief merits and his chief failings spring. He introduces no novelty into satire save the almost unvarying bitterness and ferocity of his tone. Like Horace and Persius, he employs the dactylic hexameter to the exclusion of other metres, while, owing in the main to his taste for declamation, he is far more sparing in the use of the dialogue-form than either of his predecessors.