several sorts of verse, varied often in the same paper, retaining
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 hexameters with iambic trimeters or with trochaic
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
"AEneids."

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 groundwork 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 own
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