Some hard and dry book in a dead language, which you have found
it impossible to read at home, but for which you have still a
lingering regard, is the best to carry with you on a journey. At
a country inn, in the barren society of ostlers and travellers, I
could undertake the writers of the silver or the brazen age with
confidence. Almost the last regular service which I performed in
the cause of literature was to read the works of
AULUS PERSIUS FLACCUS.
If you have imagined what a divine work is spread out for the
poet, and approach this author too, in the hope of finding the
field at length fairly entered on, you will hardly dissent from
the words of the prologue,
"Ipse semipaganus
Ad sacra Vatum carmen affero nostrum."
I half pagan
Bring my verses to the shrine of the poets.
Here is none of the interior dignity of Virgil, nor the elegance
and vivacity of Horace, nor will any sibyl be needed to remind
you, that from those older Greek poets there is a sad descent to
Persius. You can scarcely distinguish one harmonious sound amid
this unmusical bickering with the follies of men.
