Note 14 — THE LIFE OF JUVENAL, BY WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ.

The former of these, Dodwell says, was written in exile, after the author was turned of eighty. Salmasius, more rationally, conceives it to have been produced at Rome. Giving full credit, however, to the story of his late banishment, he is driven into a very awkward supposition. "An non alio tempore, atque alia de causa Ægyptum lustrare juvenis potuit Juvenalis? animi nempe gratia, και της ἱστοριας χαριν, ut urbes regionis illius, populorumque mores cognosceret?" Would it not be more simple to attribute his exile at once to Domitian?

With respect to the 16th Satire, Dodwell, we see, hesitates to attribute it to Juvenal; and, indeed, the old Scholiast says, that, in his time, many thought it to be the work of a different hand. So it always appeared to me. It is unworthy of the author's best days, and seems but little suited to his worst. He was at least eighty-one, they say, when he wrote it, yet it begins—

Surely, at this age, the writer resembled Priam, the tremulus miles, more than the timid tyro! Nor do I believe that Juvenal would have been much inclined to amuse himself with the fancied advantages of a profession to which he was so unworthily driven. But the Satire must have been as ill-timed for the army as for himself, since it was probably, at this period, in a better state of subjection than it had been for many reigns. I suppose it to be written in professed imitation of our author's manner, about the age of Commodus. It has considerable merit, though the first and last paragraphs are feeble and tautological; and the execution of the whole is much inferior to the design.