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constantly accustomed to look in the absence of anything more directly conclusive. The memoir of Persius mentions Lucilius, but says not a word of Horace: the quotations from Horace in the commentary of the pseudo-Cornutus are, as I have said, far from numerous: while the difference of the poets themselves, their personal history, their philosophical profession, their taste and temperament, the nature and power of their genius, is greater even than in the case of Persius and Lucilius, and is only more clearly brought out by the clearer knowledge we possess of each, in the possession of the whole of their respective works. The fact, however, is only too palpable-so much so that it puzzles us, as it were, by its very plainness: we could understand a less degree of imitation, but the correspondence which we actually see makes us, so to speak, half incredulous, and compels us to seek some account of it. It is not merely that we fi d the same topics in each, the same class of allusions and illustrations, or even the same thoughts and the same images but the resemblance or identity extends to things which every poet, in virtue of his own peculiarities and those of his time, would naturally be expected to provide for himself. With him, as with Horace, a miser is a man who drinks vinegar for wine, and stints himself in the oil which he pours on his vegetables; while a contented man is one who acquiesces in the prosperity of people whose start in life is worse than his own. The prayer of the farmer is still that he may turn up a pot of money some day while he is ploughing: the poets hope is still that his verses may be embalmed with cedar oil, his worst fear still that they may furnish wrapping for spices. Nay, where he mentions names they are apt to be the names of Horatian personages: his great physician is Craterus, his grasping rich man Nerius, his crabbed censor Bestius, his low reprobate Natta. Something is doubtless due to the existence of what, to adopt a term applied by Colonel Mure to the Greek epic writers, we may call satirical commonplace, just as Horace himself is thought to have taken the name Nomentanus from Lucilius; or as, among our own satirists, Bishop Hall talks of Labeo, and Pope of Gorgonius. So Persius may have intended not so much to copy Horace as to quote him-advertising his readers, as it were, from time to time that he was using the language of satire. But the utmost that can be proved is, that he followed prodigally an example which had been set sparingly, not knowing or not remembering that satire is a kind of composition which of all others is kept alive not by antiquarian associations, but by contemporary interest—not by generalized conventionalities, but by direct individual protraiture. We can hardly doubt that a wider worldly knowledge would have led him to correct his error of judgment, though the history of English authors shows us, in at least one

instance, that of Ben Jonson, that a man, not only of true comic genius but of large experiences of life, may be so enslaved by acquired learning as to satirize vice and folly as he reads of it in his books, rather than as he sees it in society.

But time warns me that I must leave the yet unfinished list of the influences which worked or may have worked upon Persius, and say a few words upon his actual merits as a writer. The tendency of what has been advanced hitherto has been to make us think of him as more passive than active as a candidate more for our interest and our sympathy than for our admiration. But we must not forget that it is his own excellence that has made him a classic-that the great and true glory which, as Quintilian says, he gained by a single volume, has been due to that volume alone. If we would justify the award of his contemporaries and of posterity, we may be prepared to account for it. It was not, as we have seen, that he was an originating power in philosophy, or a many-sided observer of men and manners. He was a satirist, but he shows no knowledge of many of the ingredients which, as Juvenal rightly perceived, go to make up the satiric medley. He was what in modern parlance would be called a plagiarist—a charge which, later if not sooner, must have told fatally on an otherwise unsupported reputation. I might add that he is frequently perplexed in arrangement and habitually obscure in meaning, were it not that some judges have professed to discover in this the secret of his fame. A truer appreciation will, I believe, be more likely to find it in the distinct and individual character of his writings, the power of mind and depth of feeling visible throughout, the austere purity of his moral tone, relieved by frequent outbreaks of genial humour, and the condensed vigour and graphic freshness of a style where elaborate art seems to be only nature triumphing over obstacles. Probably no writer ever borrowed so much and yet left on the mind so decided an impression of originality. His description of the wilful invalid and his medical friend in the third satire owes much of its colouring to Horace, yet the whole presentation is felt to be his own-true, pointed, and sufficient. Even when the picture is entirely Horatian, like that of the over covetous man at his prayers, in the second satire, the effect is original still, though the very varieties which discriminate it may be referred to hints in other parts of Horace's own works. We may wish that he had painted from his own observation and knowledge, but we cannot deny that he has shown a painter's power. And where he draws the life that he must have known, not from the descriptions of a past age but from his own experience, his portraits have an imaginative truth, minutely accurate yet highly ideal, which would entitle them to a distinguished place in any poetical gallery.

There is nothing in Horace or Juvenal more striking than the early part of the third satire, where the youthful idler is at first represented by a series of light touches, snoring in broad noon while the harvest is baking in the fields and the cattle reposing in the shade, then starting up and calling for his books only to quarrel with them—and afterwards as we go further the scene darkens, and we see the figure of the lost profligate blotting the background, and catch an intimation of yet more fearful punishments in store for those who will not be warned in time— punishments dire as any that the oppressors of mankind have suffered or devised the beholding of virtue in her beauty when too late, and the consciousness of a corroding secret which no other heart can share. Nor would it be easy to parallel the effect of the sketches in the first satire, rapidly succeeding each other, the holiday poet with his white dress and his onyx ring tuning his voice for recitation; a grey and bloated old man, giving himself up to cater for the itching ears of others; the jaded, worn company at the table, languidly rousing themselves in the hope of some new excitement; the inferior guests at the bottom of the hall ready to applaud when they have got the cue from their betters -all flung into a startling and ghastly light by the recollection carefully presented to us that these men call themselves the sons of the old Romans, and recognise poetry as a divine thing, and acknowledge the object of criticism to be truth. Again we see the same pictorial skill and reality, though in a very different style, toned down and sobered, in those most sweet and touching lines describing the poet's residence with his beloved teacher, when they used to study together through long summer suns and seize on the first and best hours of the night for their social meal, each working while the other worked and resting while the other rested, and both looking forward to the modest enjoyment of the evening as the crown of a well-spent day. Persius' language has been censured for its harshness and exaggeration: but here, at any rate, he is as simple and unaffected as an admirer of Horace or Virgil could desire. The contrast is instructive, and may perhaps suggest a more favourable view of those peculiarities of expression which are generally condemned. The style which his taste leads him to drop when he is not writing satire, is the style which his taste leads him to assume for satiric purposes. He feels that a clear, straightforward, everyday manner of speech would not suit a subject over which the gods themselves might hesitate whether to laugh or to weep. He has to write the tragi-comedy of his day, and he writes it in a dialect where grandiose epic diction and philosophical terminology are strangely blended with the talk of the forum, the gymnasia, and the barber's shop. I suggest this consideration with the more confidence, as I find it

represented to me and, as it were, forced on me by the example of a writer of our own country, perhaps the most remarkable of the present time, who, though differing as widely from Persius in all his circumstances as a world-wearied and desponding man of the nineteenth century can differ from an enthusiastic and inexperienced youth of the first, still appears to me to bear a singular resemblance to him in the whole character of his genius-I mean Mr. Carlyle. If Persius can take the benefit of this parallel, he may safely plead guilty to the charge of not having escaped the vice of his age, the passion for refining still further on Augustan refinements of expression and locking up the meaning of a sentence in epigrammatic allusions, which in its measure lies at the door even of Tacitus.

I have exhausted my time and, I fear, your patience also, when my subject is still far from exhausted. I am glad, however, to think that in closing I am not really bringing it to an end, but that some of my hearers to-day will accompany me to-morrow and on future days in the special study of one who, like all great authors, will surrender the full knowledge of his beauties only to those who ask it of him in detail.

A. PERSII FLACCI

SATURARUM

LIBER

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