A different view of art and literature, and one which adds considerably to our knowledge of the ancient feeling about them, is given by another class of pieces, the irrisory epigrams of the Anthology. Then, as now, people were amused by bad and bored by successful artists, and delighted to laugh at both; then, as now, the life of the scholar or the artist had its meaner side, and lent itself easily to ridicule from without, to jealousy and discontent from within. The air rang with jeers at the portrait-painter who never got a likeness, the too facile composer whose body was to be burned on a pile of five-and-twenty chests all filled with his own scores, the bad grammar of the grammarian, the supersubtle logic and the cumbrous technical language of the metaphysician, the disastrous fertility of the authors of machine-made epics.[6] The poor scholar had become proverbial; living in a garret where the very mice were starved, teaching the children of the middle classes for an uncertain pittance, glad to buy a dinner with a dedication, and gradually petrifying in the monotony of a thousand repetitions of stock passages and lectures to empty benches.[7] Land and sea swarmed with penniless grammarians.[8] The epigrams of Palladas of Alexandria bring before us vividly the miseries of a schoolmaster. Those of Callimachus shew with as painful clearness how the hatred of what was bad in literature might end in embittering the whole nature.[9] Many epigrams are extant which indicate that much of a scholar's life, even when he had not to earn bitter bread on the stairs of patrons, was wasted in laborious pedantry or in personal jealousies and recriminations.[10]