according to those informations which I have received from the
learned Casaubon, Heinsius, Rigaltius, Dacier, and the Dauphin's
Juvenal, to which I shall add some observations of my own.

There has been a long dispute among the modern critics whether the
Romans derived their satire from the Grecians or first invented it
themselves. Julius Scaliger and Heinsius are of the first opinion;
Casaubon, Rigaltius, Dacier, and the publisher of Dauphin's Juvenal
maintain the latter. If we take satire in the general signification
of the word, as it is used in all modern languages, for an
invective, it is certain that it is almost as old as verse; and
though hymns, which are praises of God, may be allowed to have been
before it, yet the defamation of others was not long after it.
After God had cursed Adam and Eve in Paradise, the husband and wife
excused themselves by laying the blame on one another, and gave a
beginning to those conjugal dialogues in prose which the poets have
perfected in verse. The third chapter of Job is one of the first
instances of this poem in Holy Scripture, unless we will take it
higher, from the latter end of the second, where his wife advises
him to curse his Maker.

This original, I confess, is not much to the honour of satire; but
here it was nature, and that depraved: when it became an art, it
bore better fruit. Only we have learnt thus much already--that
scoffs and revilings are of the growth of all nations; and
consequently that neither the Greek poets borrowed from other people
their art of railing, neither needed the Romans to take it from
them. But considering satire as a species of poetry, here the war
begins amongst the critics. Scaliger, the father, will have it
descend from Greece to Rome; and derives the word "satire" from