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If it be replied, continues Segrais, that it was not difficult for him to undertake and achieve such hardy enterprises because he wore enchanted arms, that accusation in the first place must fall on Homer ere it can reach Virgil. But I insist not on this because I know you believe not there is such an art; though not only Horace and Persius, but Augustus himself, thought otherwise.
For my own part, I can only like the characters of all four, which are judiciously given; but for my heart I cannot so much as smile at their insipid raillery. I see not why Persius should call upon Brutus to revenge him on his adversary; and that because he had killed Julius Caesar for endeavouring to be a king, therefore he should be desired to murder Rupilius, only because his name was Mr.
From the death of Augustus, Roman literature had gradually declined, and though it shone forth for a time with classic radiance in the writings of Persius, Juvenal, Quintilian, Tacitus, and the Plinies, with the death of freedom, the extinction of patriotism, and the decay of the national spirit, nothing could avert its fall.
His verses were stuffed with fragments of it, even to a fault; and he himself believed, according to the Pythagorean opinion, that the soul of Homer was transfused into him, which Persius observes in his sixth satire postquam destertuit esse Maeonides.
He humorously describes a squabble betwixt Rupilius and Persius. In what manner the mongrel Persius revenged the filth and venom of Rupilius, surnamed King, is I think known to all the blind men and barbers.
The same year he published his Translation of the Idylliums of Theocritus, with Rapin's Discourse on Pastorals, as also the Life of Phelopidas, from the Latin of Cornelius Nepos. In Dryden's Translation of Juvenal and Persius, Mr. He also translated into English, the verses before Mr. Quintenay's Compleat Gardiner. The Life of Solon, from the Greek of Plutarch.
In the smoking-parlour an Elzevir or two were left negligently open, as if Mr and Mrs Lucas had been reading the works of Persius and Juvenal when the first guests arrived.
On the contrary, it may be conjectured from what we otherwise know of the character of the three chief races of Italy, that in artistic gifts the Samnites approached nearest to the Hellenes and the Etruscans were farthest removed from them; and a sort of confirmation of this hypothesis is furnished by the fact, that the most gifted and most original of the Roman poets, such as Naevius, Ennius, Lucilius, and Horace, belonged to the Samnite lands, whereas Etruria has almost no representatives in Roman literature except the Arretine Maecenas, the most insufferable of all heart-withered and affected court-poets, and the Volaterran Persius, the true ideal of a conceited and languid, poetry-smitten, youth.
But this, though the wittiest of all his satires, has yet the least of truth or instruction in it; he has run himself into his old declamatory way, and almost forgotten that he was now setting up for a moral poet. Persius is never wanting to us in some profitable doctrine, and in exposing the opposite vices to it.
He next seems to have attended a course under Remmius Palaemon; but as soon as he put on the manly gown he attached himself to Cornutus, whose intimate friend he became, and of whose ideas he was the faithful exponent. The love of the pupil for his guide in philosophy is beautiful and touching; the verses in which it is expressed are the best in Persius:
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