In another satire he gives us a Roman Caudle lecture :

"Tis night, yet hope no slumbers with your wife,
The nuptial bed is still the scene of strife;
There lives the keen debate, the clamorous brawl,
And quiet never comes that comes to all.
Fierce as a tigress plundered of her young,
Rage fires her breast, and loosens all her tongue;
When, conscious of her guilt, she feigns to groan,
And chides your gaieties to hide her own;
Storms at the scandal of your inconstant flames,
And weeps her injuries from imagined names,
With tears that marshalled at their station stand,
And flow impassioned as she gives command.
You think those showers her true affection prove,
And deem yourself so happy in her love,
With fond caresses strive her heart to cheer,
And from her eyelids kiss the starting tear.
But could you now search through the secretaire
Of this most loving, this most jealous fair,
What amorous lays, what letters you would see,
Proofs, fatal proofs of her sincerity.'

Then we are introduced to a literary matron :

'But she is more intolerable yet,

Who plays the critic when at table set;

Calls Virgil charming, and attempts to prove
Poor Dido right in venturing all for love.
From Maro and Mæonides she quotes

The striking passages, and, while she notes
Their beauties and defects, adjusts her scales,
And accurately weighs which bard prevails.

The astonished guests sit mute, grammarians yield,
Loud rhetoricians, baffled, quit the field.
Oh never may the partner of my bed
With subtleties of logic stuff her head,
Nor whirl her rapid syllogisms round,
Nor with imperfect enthymemes confound.
Enough for me if common things she know,
And boast the little learning schools bestow;
I hate the female pedagogue, who pores
Over her grammar hourly, who explores
All modes of speech, regardless of the sense,
But tremblingly alive to mood and tense;
Who puzzles me with many an uncouth phrase
From some old canticle of Numa's days,
Corrects her country friends, and cannot hear
Her husband solecise without a sneer.'

Ridiculing the women's lavish use of cosmetics, and their love of finery, he passes on to charges of wanton cruelty towards their slaves, and a superstitious belief in fortunetellers, ending too often in the secret poisoning of parents, husbands, and children :

Abroad, at home, the Belides you meet,

And Clytemnestras swarm in every street;

But here the difference lies; those bungling wives,
With a blunt axe hacked out their husbands' lives;
While now their doom is sealed with dexterous art,
And a drugged bowl performs the axe's part.
Yet if the husband, prescient of his fate,
Have fortified his breast with mithridate,

In such a case, reserved for such a deed,
Rather than fail, the dagger does the deed.'

Writing of life in Rome, he draws a humiliating picture of the spiritless condition into which the plebeian class, or the mass of the population, had fallen :

:

'For since their votes have been no longer bought,

All public care has vanished from their thought,
And those who once, with unresisting sway,

Gave armies, empire, everything away,

For two poor claims have long renounced the whole,
And only ask the circus and the dole.'

Whilst of their dwellings he says:—

'Half the city here by shores is staid,

And feeble cramps that lend a treacherous aid;
For thus the stewards patch the river wall,
Thus prop the building tottering to its fall;
Then bid the tenant court secure repose,

While the pile nods to every blast that blows.'

With bitter scorn he reproaches the wealthy, who, instead of hospitably entertaining their dependents, as formerly,

'When plain and open was the cheerful feast,
And every client was a bidden guest;

Now at the gate a paltry largess lies,

And eager hands and tongues dispute the prize;

But first, lest some false claimant should be found,
The weary steward takes his anxious round,
And prys in every face.'

With equal severity he speaks of the men of rank, and women also, who have disgraced themselves by taking part in the performances at the circus, or on the stage. Sketching the traffic along the crowded thoroughfares, and the various characters to be observed, he introduces a wellknown London impostor :-

Then some patrician is borne along on a litter, his slaves clearing a passage for him; or—

'Hark! groaning on the unwieldy waggon spreads

Its cumbrous load, tremendous. O'er our heads
Projecting elm or pine, that nods on high,
And threatens death to every passer by.'

He now takes us to a rich man's evening banquet, at which, for the favoured guests,

A lobster introduced in state

Stretches enormous o'er the bending plate,
Proud of a length of tail, he seems to eye
The humbler guests with scorn, as, towering by,

He takes the place of honour at the board,

And, crowned with costly pickles, greets the lord.'

Only a crab, however, and some coarse bread, is served to a needy client, and while a long succession of the daintiest dishes are carried past him, he hardly gets enough from the attendants to satisfy his hunger, and is expected to retire when the rest of the company adjourn to another chamber to indulge in choice wines, and to gamble. On his way home the poor man barely escapes the refuse hurled from the upper windows of the houses, or he encounters one of the street bullies who frequented the treets at night to insult helpless passers by :

'Whence come you, rogue? he cries; whose beans to-night,
Have stuffed you thus? What cobbler clubbed his mite
For leeks or sheep's-head porridge? Dumb, quite dumb!
Speak or be kicked. Yet once again, your home!
Answer, or answer not, 'tis all the same,

He lays me on, and makes me bear the blame.'

He speaks also of nocturnal marauders and highwaymen, who came

'To this vast city, as their native home,

To live at ease, and safely skulk in Rome.'

With such instances does Juvenal justify his exposure of his countryman's failings, and enable us to roll back the curtain of time, and picture to ourselves the habits and customs of days which have so long since passed away.

All the quotations are from the writings of Juvenal, by Mr E. Walford, M.A.

QUINTILIAN.

DIED A.D. 118.

UINTILIAN was a native of Calagurris in Spain, whither he returned after being educated at Rome,

but he was brought back to the capital by the Emperor Galba, and for twenty years distinguished himself as a pleader and teacher of eloquence. In the reign of Domitian he was appointed professor of rhetoric at a public school, for which he received a salary equal to eight hundred pounds a year. He published one of his orations, and complained that others had been printed, without his sanction, by shorthand writers, who had reported them very incorrectly. His celebrated work entitled 'Institutes of Oratory,' which, for completeness and felicity of illustration, far excels that of Cicero, was written after his retirement from public life. It is divided into twelve books, and of these the most attractive are the first and second, relating to general education, and the tenth, in which he criticises with considerable acuteness the productions of most of the Greek and Latin classic authors included in this epitome.

In the preface he says that he undertook the task at the earnest request of his friends, with the determination to acquit himself of it as if he were regulating the studies of an orator from his infancy. He insists that moral and intellectual excellence is as indispensable in oratory as in philo