of the thing, as Lucretius says, will not admit of a perfect explanation. Besides many examples which I could urge, the very last verse of his last satire (upon which he particularly values himself in his preface) is not yet sufficiently explicated. It is true, Holyday has endeavoured to justify his construction; but Stelluti is against it: and, for my part, I can have but a very dark notion of it. As for the chastity of his thoughts, Casaubon denies not but that one particular passage in the fourth satire (_At_, _si unctus cesses_, &c.) is not only the most obscure, but the most obscene, of all his works. I understood it, but for that reason turned it over. In defence of his boisterous metaphors he quotes Longinus, who accounts them as instruments of the sublime, fit to move and stir up the affections, particularly in narration; to which it may be replied that where the trope is far-fetched and hard, it is fit for nothing but to puzzle the understanding, and may be reckoned amongst those things of Demosthenes which Æschines called θαύματα, not ῥήματα—that is, prodigies, not words. It must be granted to Casaubon that the knowledge of many things is lost in our modern ages which were of familiar notice to the ancients, and that satire is a poem of a difficult nature in itself, and is not written to vulgar readers; and (through the relation which it has to comedy) the frequent change of persons makes the sense perplexed, when we can but divine who it is that speaks—whether Persius himself, or his friend and monitor, or, in some places, a third person. But Casaubon comes back always to himself, and concludes that if Persius had not been obscure, there had been no need of him for an interpreter. Yet when he had once enjoined himself so hard a task, he then considered the Greek proverb, that he must χελώνης φαγεῖν, ἢ μὴ φαγεῖν (either eat the whole snail or let it quite alone); and so he went through with his laborious task, as I have done with my difficult translation. Thus far, my lord, you see it has gone very hard with Persius. I think he cannot be allowed to stand in competition either with Juvenal or Horace. Yet, for once, I will venture to be so vain as to affirm that none of his hard metaphors or forced expressions are in my translation. But more of this in its proper place, where I shall say somewhat in particular of our general performance in making these two authors English. In the meantime I think myself obliged to give Persius his undoubted due, and to acquaint the world, with Casaubon, in what he has equalled and in what excelled his two competitors.