_Nomen cum violis rosisque natum._ Wherefore Ben Jonson took it for the heroine of this most beautiful thing, _The Sad Shepherd_. There are two things noticeable here—first, Martial’s truly poetical sensitiveness to the beauty of a name, for certainly there is none prettier than Earine (let him keep the masculine to himself!) which also appears elsewhere; and secondly his equally poetical yearning for that licence of “common” quantification, which has made Greek and English the two great poetical languages of the world.[342] If he would have developed these views a little oftener, and at a little greater length, we really could have spared a considerable number of epigrams imputing unmentionable offences to the persons he did not like. It was his cue, however, to profess (though half his charm comes from his sense of them) disdain for such niceties, as in the 81st epigram of the same book, which is one of his neatest turns. Readers, he says, and hearers like his books, but a certain poet denies that they are correctly finished (_exactos_). It does not trouble him much, for he would rather that the courses of the feast he offers pleased the guests than that they pleased the cooks. In this, light as it is, there lurks the germ of a weighty criticism, and one which would, had it been worked out, have carried Martial far from the ordinary critical standpoint of his time. That, in homely phrase analogous to his own, the proof of the pudding is in the eating—that the production of the poetical satisfaction afterwards, not the satisfaction of the examiners beforehand as to the observation of the rules, is the thing—that Martial doubtless saw, and that he, by implication, says. But he does not say it quite openly, and it might have shocked Quintilian (though it would not have shocked Longinus) if he had. Footnote 342: My friend Professor Hardie rather demurs to the idea of “common” syllables being commoner in Greek than in Latin, save possibly in proper names. But I had certainly thought they were, and, even if we allow for some poetic and humorous exaggeration in _nihil negatum_, it seems to show that Martial thought so too.