And this Petronius
charges on the authors of his time as a vice of writing, which was
then growing on the age: ne sententiae extra corpus orationis
emineant; he would have them weaved into the body of the work, and
not appear embossed upon it, and striking directly on the reader's
view. Folly was the proper quarry of Horace, and not vice; and as
there are but few notoriously wicked men in comparison with a shoal
of fools and fops, so it is a harder thing to make a man wise than
to make him honest; for the will is only to be reclaimed in the one,
but the understanding is to be informed in the other. There are
blind sides and follies even in the professors of moral philosophy,
and there is not any one sect of them that Horace has not exposed;
which, as it was not the design of Juvenal, who was wholly employed
in lashing vices (some of them the most enormous that can be
imagined), so perhaps it was not so much his talent.
"Omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico
Tangit, et admissus circum praecordia ludit.
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