discourses in several sorts of verse, varied often in the same paper; retaining[Pg 57] still in the title their original name of Satire. Both in relation to the subjects, and the variety of matters contained in them, the Satires of Horace are entirely like them; only Ennius, as I said, confines not himself to one sort of verse, as Horace does; but, taking example from the Greeks, and even from Homer himself in his Margites, which is a kind of Satire, as Scaliger observes, gives himself the licence, when one sort of numbers comes not easily, to run into another, as his fancy dictates. For he makes no difficulty to mingle hexameter with iambick trimeters, or with trochaick tetrameters; as appears by those fragments which are yet remaining of him. Horace has thought him worthy to be copied; inserting many things of his into his own Satires, as Virgil has done into his Æneids. [Pg 57] Margites Here we have Dacier making out that Ennius was the first satirist in that way of writing, which was of his invention; that is, satire abstracted from the stage, and new modelled into papers of verses on several subjects. But he will have Ennius take the ground-work of satire from the first farces of the Romans, rather than from the formed plays of Livius Andronicus, which were copied from the Grecian comedies. It may possibly be so; but Dacier knows no more of it than I do. And it seems to me the more probable opinion, that he rather imitated the fine railleries of the Greeks, which he saw in the pieces of Andronicus, than the coarseness of his old countrymen, in their clownish extemporary way of jeering. But besides this, it is universally granted, that Ennius, though an Italian, was excellently learned in the Greek language. His verses were stuffed with fragments of it, even to a fault; and he himself believed, according to the Pythagorean opinion,[Pg 58] that the soul of Homer was transfused into him; which Persius observes, in his Sixth Satire:—Postquam destertuit esse Mæonides. But this being only the private opinion of so inconsiderable a man as I am, I leave it to the farther disquisition of the critics, if they think it worth their notice. Most evident it is, that whether he imitated the Roman farce, or the Greek comedies, he is to be acknowledged for the first author of Roman satire, as it is properly so called, and distinguished from any sort of stage-play. [Pg 58] Of Pacuvius, who succeeded him, there is little to be said, because there is so little remaining of him;
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