si puteal multa cautus vibice flagellas (iv. 49), 'if in your zeal for the main chance you flog the exchange with many a stripe,' a mysterious passage generally supposed to mean 'if you exact exorbitant usury'. A little less enigmatic, but fully as forced and unnatural is dum veteres avias tibi de pulmone revello (v. 92), 'while I pull your old grandmotherly views from your heart,' or the extraordinarily harsh metaphor of the first satire (24)-- quo didicisse, nisi hoc fermentum et quae semel intus innata est rupto iecore exierit caprificus? What is the good of past study, unless this leaven--unless the wild fig-tree which has once struck its root into the breast, break through and come out? CONINGTON. which means nothing more than 'What is the good of study unless a man brings out what he has in him?' A far more serious source of obscurity, however, is his obscurity of thought. Even when the sense of individual lines has been discovered, it is often difficult to see the drift of the passage as a whole. Logical development is perhaps not to be expected in the 'hotch-potch' of the 'satura'. But one has a right to demand that the transitions should be easy and the drift of the argument clear. This Persius refuses us. The difficulties which he presents are--as in the case of Robert Browning--in part due to his adoption of the traditional dramatic form in satire, a form in which clearness of expression is as difficult as it is desirable. But we cannot excuse his obscurity as we sometimes can in Browning--either as being to some extent a realistic representation of the discursiveness and lack of method that characterize the reasonings of the average intelligent man, or on the other hand as springing from the intensity of the poet's thought. It is not the case with Persius that his thoughts press so thick and quick upon him, or are of so deep and complicated a character, as to be incapable of simple and lucid expression. It is sheer waywardness and perversity springing from the absence of true artistic feeling to which we must attribute this cardinal defect. For his thought is commonplace, and his observation of the minds and ways of men is limited.