Juvenal (Volume 15-16) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1872. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... Ip the saying be true, that the greater the poet is, the less are we likely to know of him from his own writings, Juvenal ought certainly to occupy a very high place among the poets of Eome. In this respect ho offers a most complete contrast to Horace, who has left us in his various poems an account of himself--his character, habits, and pursuits, his successes and his failures--almost as complete as, and far more instructive than, many a professed biography. Juvenal, on the other hand, never allows the personah'ty of the poet to obtrude itself in any way on the reader's notice. In reading Horace, we can never lose sight of the cultivated, genial man of the world, who indeed makes his puppets play before us, but allows them to speak only with his own voice, to utter his own words. In Juvenal, the subject entirely overshadows the idenA. o. voL xiiL A tity of the poet; we read him, but we no more think of the writer as we read, than we should allow a vision of the blind old bard to roam on the plain of the Scamander, and preside at the death of Hector or at the games around the tomb of Patroclus. All that we know of Juvenal, beyond those allusions to himself, or to contemporary history, which may be found scattered up and down throughout his writings, is contained in the volume of memoirs attributed to Suetonius. The sum and substance of what we read in his pages is as follows: -- - ' .Junius -JuTOnalii, the son or the alumnus (it is uncertain wHclk DEGREES'df-a' rich freedman, practised declamation -till;iffiar: middle; life, more for amusement than by way of'preparing "himself for school or forum. Afterwards, having written a clever Satire of a few verses on Paris the pantomime, and a poet of his time, who was puffed up with his paltry six months' military ran...