The reader is bothered by a sort of quiet annoyance that the poet should so confidently take a dubious idea for a certain one. He might easily argue against the poet that on the contrary it seemed to him that a man who commits a crime for his master is more at fault than one who commits it for himself, and he could support his position with rational arguments. For one who sins for his own advantage is driven to his deed by such emotions as rage, lust, and fear, and these as they diminish the power of willing in like measure diminish the magnitude of the offence. But one who effects a crime at another's behest comes coldly to the deed, a fact that convicts him of a far greater depravity. One could allege these and similar lines of argument against Martial's position, and could reverse the sense of his distich so that it read no less irrationally: Yet Antony's case was better than Photinus': One for his master moved, one for himself. Hence this whole category of controvertible ideas lacks literary merit and should be studiously avoided by those who aim at beauty, which in the last analysis is to be found in truth alone, and in truth of such a sort that as soon as it is proposed the reader recognises as true and accepts it. _The second virtue of ideas, that they should agree with the inner nature of the subject; and thence on ideas foreign and accidental to the subject._ The second virtue of ideas with respect to the subject-matter is that they should agree with its inner nature: that is, that they should be elicited out of the very inners of the subject and not far-fetched or drawn from external accidents which are only the accompaniments of things. By this rule we have been delivered from numerous frigid epigrams, of which I subjoin a few examples: Foreign and far-fetched is Owen's on a lyre: That there is concord in so diverse chords Discordant mankind some excuse affords.[15] As if nothing were more pertinent for making men ashamed of their discords than the concord of strings on a lyre. From concomitant accidents, and not from the very heart of the subject itself, is drawn this epigram of Germanicus Caesar, though the verses are otherwise sufficiently polished: The Thracian boy at play on the stiff ice Of Hebrus broke the waters with his weight And the swift current carried him away, Except that a smooth sherd cut off his head. The childless mother as she burned it said: "This for the flames I bore, that for the waves."[16] Certainly the mother had a deeper and more native cause of grief than that her son was destroyed partly by water and partly by fire; she would have grieved no less had he perished wholly in water or wholly in fire. The whole reason for grief, then, ought not be sought in such a slight circumstance, which was an accompaniment of and not the grounds for grief.