Juvenal is the last of the poets of the Silver Age, and the only one of them to whom the epithet 'great' can reasonably be applied. He is no faultless writer, but he has genius and power, and has risen superior to the besetting sins of the age. He is a rhetorician, it is true, but he chose a form of literature where his rhetoric could have legitimate play. But he is no plagiarist or imitator; though, as in any other poet, we may find in him many traces and even echoes of his predecessors, he is in the best sense original. He is never a mere juggler in words and phrases, he is a true artist. Form and matter are indissolubly welded and interfused one with another. And this is because, unlike other writers of the age, he has something to say. He is poet by inspiration, not by profession. His excessive pessimism, his tendency to bias and exaggeration, cannot on the worst estimate obscure his merits either as artist or moralist. His picture of society has large elements of truth, and we can no more blame him for his tendency to caricature than we can blame Hogarth. Satire, especially the satire of declamatory invective, must be one-sided, and the satirist must select the features of life which he desires to denounce. And if this leads us at times into unpleasant places and among unpleasant people unpleasantly described, that does not justify us in denouncing the satirist. It must be remembered that the true satirist is not likely to be a man of perfect character. He must have seen much and experienced much; if his character has in the process become not merely unduly embittered, but perhaps somewhat smirched, these failings may be redeemed by other qualities. And in the case of Juvenal they are so redeemed. He has not the lucid judgement of Horace nor the pure fervour of Persius. He is more positive than the former, more negative than the latter. But he has lived in a sense in which Persius never had, and possesses the gift of direct and lucid expression; therefore, when he strikes, he strikes home. He cannot, like Horace, 'play about the hearts of men,' he will have nothing of compromise, he cannot and will not adapt himself to his environment. The doctrine of [Greek: m_eden agan], the _aurea mediocritas_, have no attractions for him. Hence his ideal is often unpractical; 'the times were out of joint,' and Juvenal was not precisely the man to 'set them right'. But at least he sets forth an ideal, that any honest man must admit to be noble. It is precisely because he is no casuist, because he hits hard and unsparingly, and is translucently honest, and because his weapon is the most fervid and trenchant rhetoric, that Juvenal is the most quoted and one of the most popular of Latin poets. He has contributed little to the thought of the world, but he has taught men to hate iniquity. He does not rise to the height of such an immortal saying as virtutem videant intabescantque relicta;