In one branch of verse-writing, which must next be considered, the Roman writers have every claim to the credit of originality. There has always been, as there is at the present day, in the Italian mind a pronounced strain of satire and irony, a tendency to lampoon and epigram, a disposition to look on the seamy or ridiculous side of things. The Aretino of later Italy is a true descendant of the Lucilius of ancient Rome. The Romans themselves claimed as their very own the form of composition known as _satura_. Satire, as a tone, may appear in Greek writers of various kinds; it may even approach a special recognition in certain portions of the Old Comedy of Athens; but there existed no Greek example of a separate composition with the character implied in “a satire.” The word itself, however, demands some examination. To us it primarily implies fault-finding, general or particular, and such the satire became, particularly in the hands of Juvenal. But originally _satura_ meant a mixed dish, a medley of observations upon society and men. These observations naturally took the form of describing habits and revealing motives. It would follow that, according to the temperament of the writer, the _satura_ might become either a moral essay or a satire in the modern sense. Bitterness is not properly essential to such compositions, and in the _Satires_ of Horace there is comparatively little of that quality. His _Epistles_, which are practically only _saturae_ under another name, are still more distinguished by geniality. Nevertheless, just as “censure” began by meaning “judgement” and has come to mean unfavourable judgement, so “satire” speedily limited its implication even among the Romans. A hundred years before Horace a certain Lucilius (of whom only fragments remain) had practised a vigorous but rough invective in his _saturae_, but for us it is Horace who represents the establishment of satire as a species of cultivated writing. To him these compositions were _sermones_, or “talks,” and they were permitted to serve as the vehicle for a frank egotism not unlike that of the _Essais_ of Montaigne. They are “satirical” in that they from time to time administer more or less caustic chastisement to contemporary follies or vices. Three-quarters of a century later, in the silver age, Persius put forth a small book of satires full of promise, but also full of faults in the way of obscurities and artificialities of style. Trained as a philosopher, he had studied mankind from books, and particularly from Horace, rather than from experience, and, as he died at twenty-eight, it may be presupposed that his insight is far from deep. Fortunately he was withheld from the savage invective customary with youth by his philosophic sincerity and the mildness of his nature. It is early in the next century that satire, in the hands of Juvenal, becomes the polished and trenchant weapon of offence now commonly understood by the term.