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It is true, Holyday has endeavoured to justify his construction; but Stelluti is against it: and, for my part, I can have but a very dark notion of it. I understood it, but for that reason turned it over. But Casaubon comes back always to himself, and concludes that if Persius had not been obscure, there had been no need of him for an interpreter.
But more of this in its proper place, where I shall say somewhat in particular of our general performance in making these two authors English. In the meantime I think myself obliged to give Persius his undoubted due, and to acquaint the world, with Casaubon, in what he has equalled and in what excelled his two competitors.
"If Persius," says he, "be in himself obscure, yet my interpretation has made him intelligible." There is no question but he deserves that praise which he has given to himself; but the nature of the thing, as Lucretius says, will not admit of a perfect explanation.
Neither Persius nor Juvenal, Boileau nor Pope, bears any real resemblance to him. The two former were satirists in the modern sense; the two latter have caught what we may call the town side of Horace, but they are accomplished epigrammatists and rhetoricians, which he is not, and they entirely lack his strong love for the simple and the rural.
Boswell's quotation is from Persius, Satires, i. 27: 'Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter. It is the motto to The Spectator, No. 379. She died four months after her father. I cannot find that she received this additional fortune. See ante, ii. 47. See ante, iv. 5, note 2. See ante, iii. 231.
Such criticism as arose in Germany from Captain Persius, for example centered on "Tirpitz's faulty constructional methods"; which, in the light of the facts of the battle would seem to be the very last thing to hit upon. As for types and weapons it is clear that the armored cruisers served only as good targets and death traps.
His memory was prodigious, his eloquence seductive, and a power of extempore versification in the most difficult metres enhanced the charm of his conversation. He is referred to by Pliny, Quintilian, and Juvenal, and for a time superintended the studies of the young satirist Persius. Oratory, as may easily be supposed, had well nigh ceased.
For there is wonderful learning in him, freedom of speech with the bitterness that comes therefrom, and an inexhaustible wit. Horace is far terser and purer, and without a rival in his sketches of character. Persius has earned much true glory by his single book. There are men now living who are renowned, and others who will be so hereafter.
As these two Principles of Action draw different Ways, Persius has given us a very humourous Account of a young Fellow who was rouzed out of his Bed, in order to be sent upon a long Voyage, by Avarice, and afterwards over-persuaded and kept at Home by Luxury. I shall set down at length the Pleadings of these two imaginary Persons, as they are in the Original with Mr. Dryden's Translation of them.
Persius, i, 4-5: Ne mihi Polydamas et Troiades Labeonem praetulerint? "Are you afraid that Polydamas and the Trojan Ladies will prefer Labeo to me?" The Trojan Ladies, of course, stand for the aristocratic classes, Colonial Dames, so to speak, who were fond of tracing their descent back to Troy just as Americans like to discover that their ancestors came over in the Mayflower.
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