accordingly with variety of examples in the subdivisions of it, and
with as many precepts as there are members of it, which all together
may complete that olla or hotch-potch which is properly a satire.

Under this unity of theme or subject is comprehended another rule
for perfecting the design of true satire. The poet is bound, and
that ex officio, to give his reader some one precept of moral
virtue, and to caution him against some one particular vice or
folly. Other virtues, subordinate to the first, may be recommended
under that chief head, and other vices or follies may be scourged,
besides that which he principally intends; but he is chiefly to
inculcate one virtue, and insist on that. Thus Juvenal, in every
satire excepting the first, ties himself to one principal
instructive point, or to the shunning of moral evil. Even in the
sixth, which seems only an arraignment of the whole sex of
womankind, there is a latent admonition to avoid ill women, by
showing how very few who are virtuous and good are to be found
amongst them. But this, though the wittiest of all his satires, has
yet the least of truth or instruction in it; he has run himself into
his old declamatory way, and almost forgotten that he was now
setting up for a moral poet.

Persius is never wanting to us in some profitable doctrine, and in
exposing the opposite vices to it. His kind of philosophy is one,
which is the Stoic, and every satire is a comment on one particular
dogma of that sect, unless we will except the first, which is
against bad writers; and yet even there he forgets not the precepts
of the "porch." In general, all virtues are everywhere to be
praised and recommended to practice, and all vices to be reprehended
and made either odious or ridiculous, or else there is a fundamental