exploits, and blends contrivance with contrivance, even as the gleam of water lit by the sun's torch dances through a house quivering, and the reflected beam goes wandering and lashes the roof with tremulous reflection. There is in this passage nothing approaching real excellence, but its dexterity may reasonably command some respect. It is dexterity of which Silius has little to show. He is well-read in history and its bastard sister mythology. At his best he can string together his incidents with some skill, and he makes use of his learning in the accepted fashion of his day.[624] The poem is deluged with proper names and learned aetiology, though he has no conception of that magical use of proper names and legendary allusions which is the secret of the masters of literary epic.[625] But the absence of any true poetic genius makes him the most tedious of Latin authors, and his unenviable reputation is well deserved. For the poetry of the struggle with Carthage for the plumed troops and the big wars That make ambition virtue, for 'all quality, pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war', we must go to the inspired prose of Livy. And yet it is well that the _Punica_ should have been preserved. It is well to know that as France has its _Henriade_ and England its _Madoc_, so Rome had its _Punica_. It is our one direct glimpse into the work of that cultured society, devastated by the 'scribendi caccethes', as Juvenal puts it, or, from the point of view of the facile Pliny, adorned by the number of its poets.[626] The _Punica_ have won an immortality far other than that prophesied for them by Martial,[627] but they show us the work of a cultured Roman gentleman of his day, who, if he had small capacity, had a high enthusiasm for letters, who had diligence if he had not genius, and was possessed by a love for the supreme poet in whose steps he followed, a passion so sincere that it may win from his scanty readers at least a partial forgiveness for the inadequacy of his imitation and for the suffering inflicted on all those who have essayed the dreary adventure of reading the seventeen books that bear his name. CHAPTER XI MARTIAL