human
Juvenal, who looked upon the alliance of the agreeable with the odious as utterly incompatible, contemned the feeble weapon of ridicule, so familiar to his predecessor: he therefore seized the sword of Satire, or, to speak more properly, fabricated one for himself, and rushing from the palace to the tavern, and from the gates of Rome to the boundaries of the empire, struck, without distinction, whoever deviated from the course of nature, or from the paths of honor. It is no longer a poet like Horace, fickle, pliant, and fortified with that indifference so falsely called philosophical, who amused himself with bantering vice, or, at most, with upbraiding a few errors of little consequence, in a style, which, scarcely raised above the language of conversation, flowed as indolence and pleasure directed; but a stern and incorruptible censor, an inflamed and impetuous poet, who sometimes rises with his subject to the noblest heights of tragedy.