If there are thirty good epigrams in a book, he is satisfied (vii. 81). His defence hardly answers the question, 'Why publish so many?' but should at least mollify our judgement. Few poets read better in selections than Martial, and of few poets does selection give so inadequate an idea. For few poets of his undoubted genius have left such a large bulk of work which, in spite of its formal perfection, is morally repulsive or, from the purely literary standpoint, uninteresting. But he is an important figure in the history of literature, for he is the father of the modern epigram. Alone of Silver Latin poets is he a perfect stylist. He has the gift of _felicitas_ to the full, but it is not _curiosa_. Inferior to Horace in all other points, he has greater spontaneity. And he is free from the faults of his age. He is no _virtuoso_, eaten up with self-conscious vanity; he attempts no impossible feats of language; he is clear, and uses his mythological and geographical knowledge neatly and picturesquely; but he makes no display of obscure learning. 'I would please schoolmasters,' he says, 'but not _qua_ schoolmasters' (x. 21. 5). So, too, he complains of his own education: at me litterulas stulti docuere parentes: quid cum grammaticis rhetoribusque mihi? (ix. 73. 7). My learning only proves my father fool! Why would he send me to a grammar school? HAY. As a result, perhaps, of this lack of sympathy with the education of his day, we find that, while he knows and admires the great poets of the past, and can flatter the rich poetasters of the present, his bent is curiously unliterary. He gives us practically no literary criticism. It is with the surface qualities of life that he is concerned, with its pleasures and its follies, guilty or innocent. He has a marvellously quick and clear power of observation, and of vivid presentation. He is in this sense above all others the poet of his age. He either does not see or chooses to ignore many of the best and most interesting features of his time, but the picture which he presents, for all its incompleteness, is wider and more varied than any other. We both hate him and read him for the sake of the world he depicts. 'Ugliness is always bad art, and Martial often failed as a poet from his choice of subject.'[682] There are comparatively few of his poems which we read for their own sake. Remarkable as these few poems are, the main attraction of Martial is to be found not in his wit or finish, so much as in the vividness with which he has portrayed the life of the brilliant yet corrupt society in which his lot was cast. It lives before us in all its splendour and in all its squalor. The court, with its atmosphere of grovelling flattery, its gross vices veiled and tricked out in the garb of respectability; the wealthy official class, with their villas, their favourites, their circle of dependants, men of