The dessert consisted of a blackbird pie, dried grapes, and candied nuts. There were also quinces, stuck so full of spices that they looked like so many hedgehogs. Yet all this might have been endured, had not the next dish been so monstrous and disgusting that we would rather have perished of hunger than touched it; for, it being placed upon the table, and, as we imagined, a good fat goose, with fish and all kinds of fowl round it, Trimalchio cried, “Whatever you see here is all made out of one body!” I, being a cunning spark, took a guess at what it might really be, and, turning to Agamemnon, “I wonder,” said I, “whether all this is not made of loam? I once remember seeing such an imaginary dish in the Saturnalia at Rome.” Scarce had I ended, when Trimalchio began to praise his cook: “There is no cleverer fellow in the world. Out of the belly he’ll make you a dish of fish; a plover out of a piece of fat bacon; a turtle out of leg of pork; and a hen out of the intestines. And therefore, in my opinion, he has a very suitable name, for we call him Dædalus. Because he is such an ingenious fellow, a friend of his brought him a present of knives from Rome, of German steel; and immediately he called for them, and, turning them over, gave us the liberty to try the edges on his cheeks.” Just then in rushed two servants in high dispute, as if they were quarreling about a yoke, from which hung two earthen jars. And when Trimalchio had judged between them, neither of them stood to the sentence, but each fell to club law, and broke the other’s jar. Amazed at the insolence of these drunken rascals, all our eyes were fixed on their conflict, when we perceived oysters and other shell-fish to fall from the broken jars, a boy collecting them in a charger and handing them about among the guests. Nor was the cook’s ingenuity in the least unworthy of this extraordinary magnificence; for he brought us snails upon a silver gridiron, and with a shrill, unpleasant voice sang us a song.... We were almost pushed off our couches by the crowd of servants who rushed into the hall; and who should be seated above me but the ingenious cook, that had made a goose from a piece of pork, all reeking of pickles and kitchen slops. Not content with being seated at table, he began to act Thespis the Tragedian; and soon after he challenged his master to contend with him for the laurel wreath at the next chariot-races. --_Trimalchio’s Banquet._ Persius, who died at twenty-eight, left us six satires. Though an imperfect imitator of Horace, his work is characterized by earnestness and a true sense of satire. _POETIC FAME_