fly-catcher.[38] This reflection at the same time excuses Horace, but exalts Juvenal.--I have ended, before I was aware, the comparison of Horace and Juvenal, upon the topics of instruction and delight; and, indeed, I may safely here conclude that common-place; for, if we make Horace our minister of state in satire, and Juvenal of our private pleasures, I think the latter has no ill bargain of it. Let profit have the pre-eminence of honour, in the end of poetry. Pleasure, though but the second in degree, is the first in favour. And who would not chuse to be loved better, rather than to be more esteemed? But I am entered already upon another topic, which concerns the particular merits of these two satirists. However, I will pursue my business where I left it, and carry it farther than that common observation of the several ages in which these authors flourished. When Horace writ his Satires, the monarchy of his Cæsar was in its newness, and the government but just made easy to the conquered people. They could not possibly have forgotten the usurpation of that prince upon their freedom, nor the violent methods which he had used, in the compassing that vast design: they yet remembered his proscriptions, and the slaughter of so many noble Romans, their defenders: amongst the rest, that horrible action of his, when he forced Livia from the arms of her husband, who was constrained to see her married, as Dion relates the story, and, big with child as she was, conveyed to the bed of his insulting rival. The same Dion Cassius gives us another instance of the crime before mentioned; that Cornelius Sisenna being reproached, in full senate, with the licentious conduct of his wife, returned this answer, "that he had married her by the counsel of Augustus;" intimating, says my author, that Augustus had obliged him to that marriage, that he might, under that covert, have the more free access to her. His adulteries were still before their eyes: but they must be patient where they had not power. In other things that emperor was moderate enough: propriety was generally secured; and the people entertained with public shows and donatives, to make them more easily digest their lost liberty. But Augustus, who was conscious to himself of so many crimes which he had committed, thought, in the first place, to provide for his own reputation, by making an edict against Lampoons and Satires, and the authors of those defamatory writings, which my author Tacitus, from the law-term, calls _famosos libellos_.