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 Vice holds the dizzy summit: spread thy sail, Indignant Muse, and drive before the gale! But who shall find, or whence—I hear thee ask— An inspiration level with the task? Whence that frank courage of an elder Rome, When Satire, fearless, sent the arrow home? 'Whom am I bound,' she then could cry, 'to spare? If high-placed guilt forgive not, do I care?' Paint now the prompter of a Nero's rage— The torments of a Christian were thy wage,— Pinned to the stake, in blazing pitch to stand, Or, on the hook that dragg'd thee, plough the sand... * * * * * *    No danger will attend thee if thou tell How to Aeneas warlike Turnus fell; No spite resents Achilles' fateful day. Or Hylas, with his urn, the Naiads' prey: But when Lucilius, all his soul afire, Bared his good sword and wreak'd his generous ire, Flush'd cheeks bewrayed the secrets lock'd within. And chill hearts shivered with their conscious sin. Hence wrath and tears. Ere trumpets sound, debate: Warriors, once armed, repent of war too late. 'Then shall plain speech be tried on those whose clay Rests by the Latin or Flaminian Way.' "

He did indeed try the plainest of speech, not only on dead tyrants and their ministers, but on the society of his own time. The elder Disraeli remarks that Richard Steele meant the Tatler to deal with three provinces—manners, letters, and politics; and that, as to politics, "it remained for the chaster genius of Addison to banish this disagreeable topic from his elegant pages." Horace was in this respect the Addison of Satire under the Empire. In Juvenal the Italian medley once more exhibits, though with