Note 29 — AN ESSAY ON THE ROMAN SATIRISTS, BY WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ.

Yet Johnson knew him well. The peculiarity of Juvenal, he says (vol. ix., p. 424), "is a mixture of gayety and stateliness, of pointed sentences, and declamatory grandeur." A good idea of it may be formed from his own beautiful imitation of the third Satire. His imitation of the tenth (still more beautiful as a poem) has scarcely a trait of the author's manner—that is to say, of that "mixture of gayety and stateliness," which, according to his own definition, constitutes the "peculiarity of Juvenal." "The Vanity of Human Wishes" is uniformly stately and severe, and without those light and popular strokes of sarcasm which abound so much in his "London."