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But I am not sure whether, in later life, he ever sat down to read consecutively the greatest works of AEschylus and Sophocles, although he used occasionally to dip into them." The Greek dramatists, in fact, seem to have affected Tennyson's work but slightly, while he constantly reminds us of Virgil, Homer, Theocritus, and even Persius and Horace.

Juvenal looked down upon the corruption of the age from the eminence of his virtue, and punished it like an avenging deity. Persius, pure in heart and passionless by education, while he lashes wickedness in the abstract, almost ignores its existence, and shrinks from probing to the bottom the vileness of the human heart.

Persius in a later age studied him with care, and tried to reproduce his style, but with such a signal want of success that in every passage where he imitates, he caricatures his master. He has, however, left us an appreciative and beautiful criticism on the Horatian method. It has often been supposed that the Ars Poetica was writen in the hope of regenerating the drama.

It was late before Persius made the acquaintance of Seneca, and then he was not much struck with his natural endowments.

"Ilia subter Caecum vulnus habes; sed lato balteus auro Praetegit." Persius. Several days elapsed before the family of the manor-house encountered Aram again. The old woman came once or twice to present the inquiries of her master as to Miss Lester's accident; but Aram himself did not appear.

At first, it is an invasion, an irruption, an overflow, as of a torrent that has burst its banks. It rushes through the expiring Latin literature, imparts some coloring to Persius, Petronius and Juvenal, and leaves behind it the Golden Ass of Apuleius. Thence it diffuses itself through the imaginations of the new nations that are remodelling Europe.

'Diana, Warwick wouldn't leave the room without a certainty. I dread the look of those men; I shall have to shake their hands! And so I do, with all my heart: only But God bless them! But we must go in, if she's coming down. They entered the house, and sat in the drawing-room, where Sir Lukin took up from the table one of his wife's Latin books, a Persius, bearing her marginal notes.

Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, had the largest library in Europe. It was credited with containing the impossible number of 50,000 volumes; its destruction during the Turkish wars is allowed to have been one of the chief misfortunes of literature. Matthias began his long reign of forty-two years in 1458, and during all that time he was adding to his collections at Buda. Some have derided Corvinus as a mere gormandiser with an appetite for all kinds of books. Some have blamed him for risking such inestimable treasures upon a dangerous frontier. It is admitted that he worked hard to dispel the thick darkness that surrounded the Hungarian people. He kept thirty scribes continually employed at Buda, besides four permitted to work at Florence by the courtesy of Lorenzo de' Médici. The whole library may be regarded as in some sense a Florentine colony. Fontius, the king's chief agent in the Levant, had been a well-known author in Florence: his Commentary upon Persius, once presented to Corvinus himself, is now in the library at Wolfenbüttel. Attavante, the pupil of Fr

Moulded by the counsels of this good "doctor," Persius adopted philosophy with enthusiasm. In an age of licentiousness he preserved a maiden purity. Though possessing in a pre-eminent degree that gift of beauty which Juvenal declares to be fatal to innocence, Persius retained until his death a moral character without a stain. But he had a nobler example even than Cornutus by his side.

The philosophy in which Persius was educated, and which he professes through his whole book, is the Stoic the most noble, most generous, most beneficial to humankind amongst all the sects who have given us the rules of ethics, thereby to form a severe virtue in the soul, to raise in us an undaunted courage against the assaults of fortune, to esteem as nothing the things that are without us, because they are not in our power; not to value riches, beauty, honours, fame, or health any farther than as conveniences and so many helps to living as we ought, and doing good in our generation.