JUVENAL wrote at a period still more detestable than that of Persius. Domitian, who now governed the empire, seems to have inherited the bad qualities of all his predecessors. Tiberius was not more hypocritical, nor Caligula more bloody, nor Claudius more sottish, nor Nero more mischievous, than this ferocious despot; who, as Theodorus Gadareus indignantly declared of Tiberius, was truly πηλον αἱματι πεφυραμενον· a lump of clay kneaded up with blood! Juvenal, like Persius, professes to follow Lucilius; but what was in one a simple attempt, is in the other a real imitation, of his manner.[23] Fluent and witty as Horace, grave and sublime as Persius; of a more decided character than the former, better acquainted with mankind than the latter; he did not confine himself to the mode of regulating an intercourse with the great, or to abstract disquisitions on the nature of scholastic liberty; but, disregarding the claims of a vain urbanity, and fixing all his soul on the eternal distinctions of moral good and evil, he labored, with a magnificence of language peculiar to himself, to set forth the loveliness of virtue, and the deformity and horror of vice, in full and perfect display. Dusaulx, who is somewhat prejudiced against Horace, does ample justice to Juvenal. There is great force in what he says; and, as I do not know that it ever appeared in English, I shall take the liberty of laying a part of it before the reader, at the hazard of a few repetitions. "The bloody revolution which smothered the last sighs of liberty,[24] had not yet found time to debase the minds of a people, among whom the traditionary remains of the old manners still subsisted. The cruel but politic Octavius scattered flowers over the paths he was secretly tracing toward despotism: the arts of Greece, transplanted to the Capitol, flourished beneath his auspices; and the remembrance of so many civil dissensions, succeeding each other with increasing rapidity, excited a degree of reverence for the author of this unprecedented tranquillity. The Romans felicitated themselves at not lying down, as before, with an apprehension of finding themselves included, when they awoke, in the list of proscription: and neglected, amid the amusements of the circus and the theatre, those civil rights of which their fathers had been so jealous. "Profiting of these circumstances, Horace forgot that he had combated on the side of liberty. A better courtier than a soldier, he clearly saw how far the refinement, the graces, and the cultivated state of his genius (qualities not much considered or regarded till his time[25]), were capable of advancing him without any extraordinary effort.