For example, in the presentation of the city, Juvenal comments that residents live 'in dread of fires, and buildings collapsing continually' and notes that there are a 'thousand other dangers of savage Rome', but his ultimate grievance, is 'the poets reciting in the month of August' (p. 167). This image appears to be comic; the humor is amplified through bathos. Martin Madan notes that 'in the month of August, the hottest season of the year [] most people had retired to the country, so that one might hope to enjoy some little quiet'.7It seems quite reasonable to suggest that by placing the ironic image of the poets last, Juvenal undermines the earlier images of terror, and exposes an element of playful hyperbole in his satire. .
Whilst Juvenal's more obvious irony appears to have been left out of London, it is arguable - although rarely argued - that Johnson retains it in his construction of the pastoral.8 I believe that Johnson does not simply 'miss the irony in Juvenal's presentation of country pleasures', 9 but instead, develops it and uses it to present an idealized and complex view of rural existence, which has a dual purpose. On a simple level it acts as a foil to heighten the sense of dire misery within the 'curs'd walls' of London (l. 37), yet, it can also be seen as a utopian dream; a 'vanity of human wishes'.10 The first purpose becomes evident at the start of the poem, when it is asked, 'For who would leave, unbrib'd, Hibernia's land, Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand? There none are swept by sudden fate away, But all whom hunger spares with age decay' (p. 1). The implication here is that the city is an unnatural place, a place where death is a perpetually imminent threat, conversely, in the wilds of Scotland, the speaker suggests that people die of old age; their lives follow a natural pattern. Such contrasts, between the urban and the rural, between the natural and the unnatural, are easily distinguished throughout London.
