And to show I am impartial I will here translate what Dacier has
said on that subject:-
"I cannot give a more just idea of the two books of satires made by
Horace than by comparing them to the statues of the Sileni, to which
Alcibiades compares Socrates in the Symposium. They were figures
which had nothing of agreeable, nothing of beauty on their outside;
but when any one took the pains to open them and search into them,
he there found the figures of all the deities. So in the shape that
Horace presents himself to us in his satires we see nothing at the
first view which deserves our attention; it seems that he is rather
an amusement for children than for the serious consideration of men.
But when we take away his crust, and that which hides him from our
sight, when we discover him to the bottom, then we find all the
divinities in a full assembly--that is to say, all the virtues which
ought to be the continual exercise of those who seriously endeavour
to correct their vices."
It is easy to observe that Dacier, in this noble similitude, has
confined the praise of his author wholly to the instructive part the
commendation turns on this, and so does that which follows:-
"In these two books of satire it is the business of Horace to
instruct us how to combat our vices, to regulate our passions, to
follow nature, to give bounds to our desires, to distinguish betwixt
truth and falsehood, and betwixt our conceptions of things and
things themselves; to come back from our prejudicate opinions, to
understand exactly the principles and motives of all our actions;
and to avoid the ridicule into which all men necessarily fall who
are intoxicated with those notions which they have received from
their masters, and which they obstinately retain without examining
whether or no they be founded on right reason.
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