Here we have the certainly pointed, if not very polite, excuse for not submitting to the same tax of presentation copies, that he fears his friend may reply with a present of _his_ works:[325] elsewhere (in those triumphs of ingenious trifling the _apophoreta_, or gift-tickets) the neat suggestion, with a blank album, that a poet can offer no more acceptable present than paper _not_ written upon.[326] In one place there is, to carry off a piece of sheer begging, an irresistibly comic anecdote of a “curious impertinent,” who after asking whether the poet is not the Martial whom everybody not a fool admires, and receiving a confession of the soft impeachment, abruptly demands why such a poet has such a shocking bad great-coat, and receives the meek reply, _quia sum malus poeta_.[327] But these, and a good many others, which an easy reading, and a not very troublesome classification, of the _Epigrams_ will enable any one to produce, are examples parallel rather to our citations from Juvenal than to the capital one from Persius. That is to say, they are examples rather of the selection of a particular subject, as one of a hundred suitable to the special mode of treatment, than of the assertion or the display of any particular interest in that subject, or any special theories upon it. So, too, in some cases of more special reference, Martial’s habits of flattery, and the unblushing way in which (not for the first or the last time) men of letters in his generation were wont to fish for presents, make it not always quite easy to know how much seriousness to attach to his expressions of opinion on particular writers. Did he, for instance, really think Silius Italicus such a great poet?[328] One cannot say: it is certain that Silius was rich, and a person who seems to have been able to keep his head above water, and on his shoulders, during all the stormy changes of his lifetime. And if such a man wrote poetry, if he was not his enemy—still more if, as was the case here, he was his friend—we know but too well that Marcus Valerius Martialis was never likely to _publish_ any unflattering opinion of it. Footnote 325: vii. 3. Footnote 326: xiv. 10. Footnote 327: vi. 82.