In the 85th of the same, the poet objects to Sabellus that he can write a few quatrains rather well, but not a book—by which he probably glances at the necessity, in a book, of varying and sorting the kinds, as well as of providing a mere quantity of monotonous stuff. And in the 90th again of the same book he is still more explicitly argumentative. A certain Matho, it seems, went about saying that Martial’s books were unequal. If this be so, retorts our bard, it is because Calvinus (? or Cluvienus, as in Juvenal) and Umber write “equal” verses, and a bad book is always an “equal” one. Footnote 335: _Insano syrmate tumet._ Footnote 336: Another and severer side of the same epigram is that, viii. 69, to Vacerra, who only praises dead poets. To die in order to please Vacerra, says the bard, is not quite _tanti_. Footnote 337: _Sapit quæ novit pungere._ Now, what exactly did he mean by “equal”? When we say that a book is unequal, we generally mean that it has faults as well as beauties, that it is not equally good, and in this sense Martial would merely be vindicating himself from the charge of a tame faultlessness, from that _æqualis mediocritas_ which Quintilian smites in passing. But, if we take it in conjunction with the Sabellus epigram just quoted, I think it will not be unfair to allow to _æqualis_ also its other sense of “unvarying,” “monotonous,” and give the prominence to this in the equivalence with _malus_ of the last line.[338] Martial specially and critically prided himself on the variety of his books, on their containing something for every taste, and something (almost) about every subject. And the book, he says therefore, that has not this quality is a bad book. The same doctrine pierces through the laudation of the prose preface of the Eighth to Domitian, and points the hope that the celestial _verecundia_ of the “bald Nero” will not be offended by the naughtier epigrams. Footnote 338: There is yet another sense of _æqualis_, “like something else,” which might be brought in.