The scanty and notable work of Persius—work which, in the junction of these two qualities, has hardly a parallel in literary [Sidenote: _Persius._] history, except that of Collins in English—is soaked in criticism of literature as well as of life. The poet’s turbid rush of thought and style, forcing its way through self-created obstacles but still forcing it, thick with suspended matter, but all the richer therefor, allows him not merely to deal directly with this subject, but in dealing with others to make constant allusion and by-blow. The famous [Sidenote: _The Prologue and First Satire._] scazontic prologue, with its affected language, satirising affectation, and its conceits, giving an object-lesson of conceited style, is all literary except the moral, _quoad_ “Master Gaster, first Master of Arts,” as Rabelais refashioned it fifteen hundred years later. The “horsy fountain” and the sleep on “two-headed” Parnassus, the relinquishment of the Muses to those whom such ladies concern, and the final fling about the crow-poets and poetess-magpies, may be gibes at dabblers in literature: but they show that the giber is steeped in literature himself, and has taken a critical as well as a delighted bath therein. And the first satire (the longest but one) is wholly and directly devoted to the subject. With the old device of a cool objecting friend, Persius takes occasion, while declaring (also an old trick) his own honest desire to keep to better matters, to draw a lively picture of the professional poet, or declamation-writer, scribbling in his locked study, arraying himself in his best clothes, and even with such jewelry as he can muster, carefully gargling his throat, and then tickling the ears of his audience, and comforting himself, when anybody objects the worthlessness of such applause, by the plea— “At pulchrum digito monstrari et dicier ‘Hic est!’”[315] A still livelier picture follows of the symposium referred to in the lines above quoted as to _Romulidæ saturi_; of the literary dandy in hyacinthine garment mincing and twanging through his nose some morbid stuff (_rancidulum quiddam_) about Phyllis and Hypsipyle, and being cheered in a fashion fit to make the poet’s ashes happy, his slab lie lighter on his tomb, and violets spring therefrom. Footnote 315: Not a few other phrases, such as— “Cum carmina lumbum Intrant, et tremulo scalpuntur ubi intima versu”— show what a formidable, and what an accurate and capable, reviewer, of the slashing order, Persius would have made.