condemned; to such impartial men I must appeal, for they who have
already formed their judgment may justly stand suspected of
prejudice; and though all who are my readers will set up to be my
judges, I enter my caveat against them, that they ought not so much
as to be of my jury; or; if they be admitted, it is but reason that
they should first hear what I have to urge in the defence of my
opinion.

That Horace is somewhat the better instructor of the two is proved
from hence--that his instructions are more general, Juvenal's more
limited. So that, granting that the counsels which they give are
equally good for moral use, Horace, who gives the most various
advice, and most applicable to all occasions which can occur to us
in the course of our lives--as including in his discourses not only
all the rules of morality, but also of civil conversation--is
undoubtedly to be preferred to him, who is more circumscribed in his
instructions, makes them to fewer people, and on fewer occasions,
than the other. I may be pardoned for using an old saying, since it
is true and to the purpose: Bonum quo communius, eo melius.
Juvenal, excepting only his first satire, is in all the rest
confined to the exposing of some particular vice; that he lashes,
and there he sticks. His sentences are truly shining and
instructive; but they are sprinkled here and there. Horace is
teaching us in every line, and is perpetually moral; he had found
out the skill of Virgil to hide his sentences, to give you the
virtue of them without showing them in their full extent, which is
the ostentation of a poet, and not his art. And this Petronius
charges on the authors of his time as a vice of writing, which was
then growing on the age: ne sententiae extra corpus orationis
emineant; he would have them weaved into the body of the work, and