not appear embossed upon it, and striking directly on the reader's
view. Folly was the proper quarry of Horace, and not vice; and as
there are but few notoriously wicked men in comparison with a shoal
of fools and fops, so it is a harder thing to make a man wise than
to make him honest; for the will is only to be reclaimed in the one,
but the understanding is to be informed in the other. There are
blind sides and follies even in the professors of moral philosophy,
and there is not any one sect of them that Horace has not exposed;
which, as it was not the design of Juvenal, who was wholly employed
in lashing vices (some of them the most enormous that can be
imagined), so perhaps it was not so much his talent.


"Omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico
Tangit, et admissus circum praecordia ludit."


This was the commendation which Persius gave him; where by vitium he
means those little vices which we call follies, the defects of human
understanding, or at most the peccadilloes of life, rather than the
tragical vices to which men are hurried by their unruly passions and
exorbitant desires. But in the word omne, which is universal, he
concludes with me that the divine wit of Horace left nothing
untouched; that he entered into the inmost recesses of nature; found
out the imperfections even of the most wise and grave, as well as of
the common people; discovering even in the great Trebatius (to whom
he addresses the first satire) his hunting after business and
following the court, as well as in the prosecutor Crispinus, his
impertinence and importunity. It is true, he exposes Crispinus
openly as a common nuisance; but he rallies the other, as a friend,