Of the same type and colour is the objection to _rasa antitheta_ and _doctæ figuræ_ which follows, as well as that to the vowel harmony, the soft cadence, the mouth-watering[317] tenderness of the Neronian fragments. We may, without rashness, point to the soft sound of “Berecynthius Attin,” the alliteration of “_di_rimebat” and “_Del_phin” with the internal half-rhyme of “_cær_uleum” and “_Ner_ea,” the leonine effect of “long_o_” and “Apennin_o_” and the two tetrasyllables, with the sudden pull up of the spondaic ending, as what irritated Persius. This same accompaniment of sound, and cunning contrast or echo of vowels, recurs in the second and more coherent extract: “_Tor_va, _cor_nua”; “Mimal_lon_eis _bom_bis,” “_rap_tum _cap_ut”; “vitul_o_ superb_o_”; “_lyn_cem co_rym_bis”; the long words “reparabilis” and “Mimalloneis,” with the foreign effect of the latter and others. These, no doubt, were the things which annoyed our poet here. Footnote 317: _Tenerum et laxa cervice legendum ... delumbe ... natat in labris ... in udo est._ A little reflection will make this annoyance exceedingly interesting. Not merely is the general effect of these lines very similar to that of hundreds and thousands of lines, in the earlier English Romantic school from Marlowe to Chamberlayne, in the later from Keats to Mr Swinburne; but the indignation of Persius is exactly similar, if not to the almost incredulous and disgusted disdain with which the critics and poets of the “school of good sense” looked back on the vagaries of their predecessors, to the alarmed and furious attempt made by critics of the present century to extinguish contemporaries who indulged in such things. Persius on Nero, if Nero it was, no doubt gave hints to, and, with hardly less doubt, was himself quite in sympathy with, the _Quarterly_ Reviewers of Keats and Tennyson. There is the same protest against the effeminate, the luscious, the unrestrained, the same indignant demand for manliness, order, sanity. But we may go even further. These same processes, which we have ventured to point out as certainly illustrated by the gibbeted verses, and as probably accounting for the wrath of their executioner, are the very processes by which all our great nineteenth-century poets in English have produced their characteristic effects—alliteration, internal rhyme or assonance, complete or muffled, and, above all, the modulation of vowel and consonant so as to produce a sort of song without music, accompanying the actual words. And it may be noted that while some of our modern critics have objected to these things in themselves, many more, oddly enough, object to the process of pointing them out, and seem to think that there is something almost indecent in it.