You say that money secures help in sickness? But _such_ help! Your greed has alienated all who would naturally love and care for you; and you must not be surprised if you do not keep the love which you are doing nothing to preserve. No, no! away with your greed; cease to think that lack of money is necessarily an evil; and beware lest your fate at last be miserably to lose your all by a violent death. No, I am not asking you to be a spendthrift. Only seek a proper mean between this and the miser's character. But, to get back to the original proposition, no one is content with his lot, but is constantly trying to surpass his fellows. And so the jostling struggle for existence goes on, and rare indeed is it to find a man who leaves this life satisfied that he has had his share of its blessings. With this conclusion another man would have been content. But Horace somehow feels that he has been a little hard upon his kind, and by way of softening down the seriousness of the lecture, and at the same time saving himself from the fault of verbosity, which he detests, he ends with a characteristic jibe at the wordy Stoic philosophers: But enough of this. Lest you think that I have stolen the notes of the blear-eyed Crispinus, I'll say no more. In another satire, Horace rebukes the fault of censoriousness. His text practically is: "Judge not that ye be not judged." With characteristic indirect approach to his subject, he begins with a tirade against one Tigellius, until we begin to be indignant with this censorious preacher; when suddenly he whips around to the other side, assumes the rôle of one of his hearers, and puts the question to himself: "Have you no faults of your own?" And then we see that he has only been playing a part, and giving us an objective illustration of how it sounds when the other man finds fault, thus exposing to themselves those who, habitually blind to their own faults, are quick to discover those of other men. The dramatic element, which seems to have been inherent in satire from the beginning, is one of the most noticeable characteristics of style in the satires of Horace. Indeed, his favorite method of expression is the dialogue, carried on either between himself and some other person, real or imaginary, or between two characters of his creation, whom he introduces as best fitted to conduct the discussion of a theme. The most dramatic of his satires is that in which he introduces the bore. In this, the poem consists solely of dialogue and descriptions of action which may be taken as stage direction. It therefore needs but slight change to give it perfect dramatic form. The problem of the episode is how to get rid of the bore and at the same time keep within the bounds of gentlemanly conduct. This famous satire is given below in full. THE BORE: A DRAMATIC SATIRE IN ONE ACT