And this is that which mainly distinguishes him from Horace--his tremendous moral earnestness, his fiery indignation. His spirit did not allow him to play with his theme; there were hard blows to strike at outbreaking sins, and he would strike them. And if venial faults were struck as hard as more serious offenses, that was a proof not of inconsistency, but of an earnestness that could not stop to distinguish; if he writes of practices too shameful for telling in the hearing of polite ears, it is because his righteous indignation was in no mood to mince words, but would hold up vice in all its hideousness to the fatal light. He speaks with frankness of shameful sins, but only to hurl his denunciations at them. He is always in a rage,--strenuous where Horace is gently satirical and whimsical; didactic and straightforward where Horace is conversational and dramatic. At the same time he paints most vivid pictures, filling in the lines with tremendous sweeps of his rhetorical brush. He tells us that he was fairly driven to write satire by the very atmosphere and daily occurrences of folly and sin around him.[D] [D] The quotations from Juvenal which follow are taken from the excellent prose version of Leeper. For who so tolerant of this wrong-headed city, who so callous, that he can contain himself when lawyer Matho's brand-new litter comes along, filled with his Greatness, and after him the betrayer of his distinguished friend, who will soon finish off the remnants of our nobility already preyed upon.... Is not one moved to fill a bulky note-book right in the middle of the cross-roads, when a man is carried past, already indulging in six bearers, showing himself to view on both sides--a forger who has made himself aristocrat and millionaire with a little tablet and a damp seal? Now you are confronted by a lady of position, who, when her husband is thirsty, just before she hands him the mild Calenian, puts in a dash of poison, and, like a superior Lucusta, teaches her unsophisticated kinswomen to carry their livid husbands to burial right through the town and all its gossip.... It is to crime that men owe their pleasure-grounds, their castles, banquets, old silver, and goblets with goat's figure in relief.... When nature refuses, sheer scorn produces verse--the best it can. He cannot abide the Greeks. His national pride is touched at the thought that not only do they swarm in Rome, monopolizing by their superior shrewdness all profitable employments, but that Rome itself has gone crazy after them, and things Greek are all the rage.