You are moist soft earth, you ought to be taken instantly, instantly, and fashioned without end by the rapid wheel. But you have a paternal estate with a fair crop of corn, a salt-cellar of unsullied brightness (no fear of ruin surely!), and a snug dish for fireside service. Are you to be satisfied with this? or would it be decent to puff yourself and vapour because your branch is connected with a Tuscan stem, and you are thousandth in the line, or because you wear purple on review days and salute your censor? Off with your trappings to the mob! I can look under them and see your skin. Are you not ashamed to live the loose life of Natta? But he is paralysed by vice; his heart is overgrown by thick collops of fat; he feels no reproach; he knows nothing of his loss; he is sunk in the depth and makes no more bubbles on the surface. Great Father of the Gods, be it thy pleasure to inflict no other punishment on the monsters of tyranny, after their nature has been stirred by fierce passion, that has the taint of fiery poison--let them look upon virtue and pine that they have lost her for ever! Were the groans from the brazen bull of Sicily more terrible, or did the sword that hung from the gilded cornice strike more dread into the princely neck beneath it, than the voice which whispers to the heart, 'We are going, going down a precipice,' and the ghastly inward paleness, which is a mystery, even to the wife of our heart? CONINGTON. The man who wrote this has 'loved righteousness and hated iniquity'. In the work of Persius' rivals it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that it is the hatred of iniquity that is most prominent; the love of righteousness holds but a secondary place. Persius is uncompromising; he is the true Stoic with the motto 'all or nothing'. But he has nothing of the stilted Stoicism that is such a painful feature of the plays of Seneca; nor, however perverse and affected he may be in diction, do we ever feel that his Stoicism is in some respects no better than a moral pose, a distressing feeling that sometimes afflicts as we read Seneca's letters or consolatory treatises. He speaks straight from the heart. His faults are more often the faults of the school of philosophy than of the schools of rhetoric. The young Lucan is said to have exclaimed, after hearing a recitation given by Persius:[243] 'That is real poetry, my verses are mere _jeux d'esprit_.'