SATIRE XIII.
Calvinus had left a sum of money in the hands of a confidential person, who, when he came to re-demand it, forswore the deposit. The indignation and fury expressed by Calvinus at this breach of trust, reached the ears of his friend Juvenal, who endeavors to soothe and comfort him under his loss. The different topics of consolation follow one another naturally and forcibly, and the horrors of a troubled conscience were perhaps never depicted with such impressive solemnity as in this Satire.
SATIRE XIV.
The whole of this Satire is directed to the one great end of self-improvement. By showing the dreadful facility with which children copy the vices of their parents, the poet points out the necessity as well as the sacred duty of giving them examples of domestic purity and virtue. After briefly enumerating the several vices, gluttony, cruelty, debauchery, etc., which youth imperceptibly imbibe from their seniors, he enters more at large into that of avarice; of which he shows the fatal and inevitable consequences. Nothing can surpass the exquisiteness of this division of the Satire, in which he traces the progress of that passion in the youthful mind from the paltry tricks of saving a broken meal to the daring violation of every principle, human and divine. Having placed the absurdity as well as the danger of immoderate desires in every point of view, he concludes with a solemn admonition to rest satisfied with those comforts and conveniences which nature and wisdom require, and which a decent competence is easily calculated to supply.
SATIRE XV.
After enumerating with great humor the animal and vegetable gods of the Egyptians, the author directs his powerful ridicule at their sottish and ferocious bigotry; of which he gives an atrocious and loathsome example. The conclusion of the Satire, which is a just and beautiful description of the origin of civil society (infinitely superior to any thing that Lucretius or Horace has delivered on the subject), founded not on natural instinct, but on principles of mutual benevolence implanted by God in the breast of man, and of man alone, does honor to the genius, good sense, and enlightened morality of the author.
SATIRE XVI.
Under a pretense of pointing out to his friend Gallus the advantages of a military life, Juvenal attacks with considerable spirit the exclusive privileges which the army had acquired or usurped, to the manifest injury of the civil part of the community.