“Stulta est clementia, cum tot ubique Vatibus occurras, perituræ parcere chartæ.” Footnote 320: It has been held that Juvenal shows his “freedman” extraction by aping and overdoing patrician prejudice in this and other matters. But I had rather not think this. Footnote 321: _Semper ego auditor tantum_, &c. The same tone is maintained throughout, and when poetry and literature appear (which is not extremely often), poets and men of letters are treated as practitioners of a rather troublesome, nearly superfluous, and slightly disreputable, profession, not as bad or good artists as the case may be. The stage-fright of the rhetorician who is going to make a speech at Lyons (the gird at the provincial is obvious), the book-chest of Codrus, with the mice gnawing the divine poems, the Greek mania which alternates with others in wives, and the learned lady who talks for hours on the comparative merits of Homer and Virgil, are introduced with the poet’s usual spirit and vigour, but very distinctly _not_ from the literary point of view. They are ludicrous things and persons, good satiric matter: but the book-chest is in the same class with the _lectus Procula minor_, the fancy for Greek with the fancy for gladiators, the critical lady with her sister who enamels her face. It is by no means un-noteworthy that, in the Tenth itself, the vanity of literary study and success—an admirably suggestive subject—is hardly touched at all; that the careers of Demosthenes and Cicero are held up as a moral because of their political ill-success, and the sanguinary fate of each—which might have happened to the most illiterate of men. But this is most noticeable of all in the Seventh, which may be said to have a definitely literary frame and scheme, or which at least certainly would have had these in the hands of a man really inclined to literary criticism. It opens with a characteristic picture of what the Americans would call a “slump” in poetry—the most celebrated bards giving up the profession in sheer despair, becoming bath-keepers, or stokers, or auctioneers’ criers, selling their tragedies at rummage sales, or at the very best getting empty praise and no pudding from their stingy though wealthy patrons. Then Juvenal becomes a little graver, and contrasts the victim of _cacoethes scribendi_ with the really exceptional poet (whom he cannot point out, and only imagines), who will put forth no hack-work, and writes not even for fame, but to please himself and the Muses. Such a poet must be in independent circumstances—if Virgil had had no boy to wait on him, and no tolerable lodging, all the snakes would have dropped from the hair of his Erinyes, says he in one of his most characteristic Juvenalisms. Lucan happened to be well off: but Statius, for all the popularity of his _Thebais_, would have gone dinnerless if he had not sold his _Agave_ to the actor Paris (apparently