When we turn to our own time, we find the literary preacher at the novelist's desk or in the editor's chair. The influence of the purpose-novel and the editorial can hardly be overestimated. In the generation immediately preceding our own, a very direct influence upon the public social life of his day was wielded by the pen of Dickens. His eyes were open to abuses of every kind--in educational, charitable, legal, and criminal institutions; and he used every weapon known to literary art to right these wrongs. In this task he was ably assisted by men like Thackeray, Reade, Kingsley, and others. And there can be little doubt that the improved conditions in the England of to-day are due in generous measure to the work of these novelist preachers. The editor's function is still more intimately and constantly to hold the mirror up to society, revealing and reproving its faults. And to-day there is probably no more potent force acting directly upon the opinions and conduct of men than the daily editorial. Now, the literary weapon of the Roman moralist was satire. It flourished in all periods of Roman literature, both the word _satire_ and the thing itself being of Latin origin. In other fields of literature there is a large imitation of Greek models. Roman tragedy was at first but little more than a translation of the Greek plays, and the same is true of comedy. Cato, Varro, Vergil, and the rest who wrote of agriculture, had a Greek prototype in Hesiod, who in his _Works and Days_ had treated of the same theme; Lucretius was the professed disciple and imitator of Epicurus; Cicero, in oratory, had ever before his eyes his Demosthenes, and in philosophy his Plato and Aristotle; Vergil had his Homer in epic and his Theocritus in pastoral; Horace, in his lyrics, is Greek through and through, both in form and spirit, for Pindar and Anacreon, Sappho, Alcæus, Archilochus, and the whole tuneful line are forever echoing through his verse. Ovid, in his greatest work, only succeeded in setting Greek mythology in a frame of Latin verse, though he told those fascinating stories as they had never been told before; while the historians, the rhetoricians, the philosophers--all had their Greek originals and models. But in the field of satire the Romans struck out a new literary path for themselves. Even here we are bound to admit that the spirit is Greek, the spirit of the old comedy, of bold assault upon the evils of government, of society, of individuals. But still satire, as a form of literature, is the Roman's own; and beginning with Lucilius, the father of satire in the modern sense, the long line of satirists who followed his lead sufficiently attests the strong hold which this particular form of literature gained upon the Roman mind.