hobbling verse, and they answered in the same kind of gross
raillery--their wit and their music being of a piece. The Grecians,
says Casaubon, had formerly done the same in the persons of their
petulant Satyrs; but I am afraid he mistakes the matter, and
confounds the singing and dancing of the Satyrs with the rustical
entertainments of the first Romans. The reason of my opinion is
this: that Casaubon finding little light from antiquity of these
beginnings of poetry amongst the Grecians, but only these
representations of Satyrs who carried canisters and cornucopias full
of several fruits in their hands, and danced with them at their
public feasts, and afterwards reading Horace, who makes mention of
his homely Romans jesting at one another in the same kind of
solemnities, might suppose those wanton Satyrs did the same; and
especially because Horace possibly might seem to him to have shown
the original of all poetry in general (including the Grecians as
well as Romans), though it is plainly otherwise that he only
described the beginning and first rudiments of poetry in his own
country. The verses are these, which he cites from the First
Epistle of the Second Book, which was written to Augustus:-


"Agricolae prisci, fortes, parvoque beati,
Condita post frumenta, levantes tempore festo
Corpus, et ipsum animum spe finis dura ferentem,
Cum sociis operum, et pueris, et conjuge fida,
Tellurem porco, Silvanum lacte piabant;
Floribus et vino Genium memorem brevis aevi.
Fescennina per hunc inventa licentia morem
Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit."