This original, I confess, is not much to the honour of satire; but
here it was nature, and that depraved: when it became an art, it
bore better fruit. Only we have learnt thus much already--that
scoffs and revilings are of the growth of all nations; and
consequently that neither the Greek poets borrowed from other people
their art of railing, neither needed the Romans to take it from
them. But considering satire as a species of poetry, here the war
begins amongst the critics. Scaliger, the father, will have it
descend from Greece to Rome; and derives the word "satire" from
Satyrus, that mixed kind of animal (or, as the ancients thought him,
rural god) made up betwixt a man and a goat, with a human head,
hooked nose, pouting lips, a bunch or struma under the chin, pricked
ears, and upright horns; the body shagged with hair, especially from
the waist, and ending in a goat, with the legs and feet of that
creature. But Casaubon and his followers, with reason, condemn this
derivation, and prove that from Satyrus the word satira, as it
signifies a poem, cannot possibly descend.
Pages:
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72