After all he was a young man, like his friend and contemporary Lucan—both of them men of extraordinary parts and great acquired knowledge, considering their youth; but neither of them had arrived to that maturity of judgment which is necessary to the accomplishing of a formed poet. And this consideration, as on the one hand it lays some imperfections to their charge, so on the other side it is a candid excuse for those failings which are incident to youth and inexperience; and we have more reason to wonder how they, who died before the thirtieth year of their age, could write so well and think so strongly, than to accuse them of those faults from which human nature (and more especially in youth) can never possibly be exempted. To consider Persius yet more closely: he rather insulted over vice and folly than exposed them like Juvenal and Horace; and as chaste and modest as he is esteemed, it cannot be denied but that in some places he is broad and fulsome, as the latter verses of the fourth satire and of the sixth sufficiently witness. And it is to be believed that he who commits the same crime often and without necessity cannot but do it with some kind of pleasure. To come to a conclusion: he is manifestly below Horace because he borrows most of his greatest beauties from him; and Casaubon is so far from denying this that he has written a treatise purposely concerning it, wherein he shows a multitude of his translations from Horace, and his imitations of him, for the credit of his author, which he calls “Imitatio Horatiana.” To these defects (which I casually observed while I was translating this author) Scaliger has added others; he calls him in plain terms a silly writer and a trifler, full of ostentation of his learning, and, after all, unworthy to come into competition with Juvenal and Horace.