And all the Assyrian monarch’s soft delights!
Here bound, at length, thy wishes. I but teach
What blessings man, by his own powers, may reach.
The path to peace is virtue. We should see,
If wise, O Fortune, naught divine in thee:
But we have deified a name alone,
And fixed in heaven thy visionary throne!”
Brevity, intensity, and vigor, are conspicuous elements in our author’s style. He always used “the best words in the right places.” Said Dryden, his only peer in satiric poetry, “Juvenal gives me as much pleasure as I can bear.” We extract from the Tenth Satire one of his most graphic passages:—
THE INSTABILITY OF FORTUNE.
[Illustrated by the fall of Sejanus.]
“Some, Power hurls headlong from her envied height;