of all, the literary defects of the author are at their height. His moral taste is not irreproachable; in his desire not to mince matters he offends needlessly against propriety. [16] The picture he draws of the fashionable rhetorician with languishing eyes and throat mellowed by a luscious gargle, warbling his drivelling ditties to an excited audience, is powerful and lifelike. From assemblies like these he did well to keep himself. We can imagine the effect upon their used-up emotions of a fresh and fiery spirit like that of Lucan, whose splendid presence and rich enthusiasm threw to the winds these tricks of the reciter's art. The second, third, and fourth poems are declamatory exercises on the dogmas of stoicism, interspersed with dramatic scenes. The second has for its subject the proper use of prayer. The majority, says Persius, utter _buying_ petitions (_prece emaci_), and by no means as a rule innocent ones. Few dare to acknowledge their prayers (_aperto vivere voto_). After sixty lines of indignant remonstrance, he closes with a noble apostrophe, in which some of the thoughts rise almost to a Christian height--"O souls bent to earth, empty of divine things! What boots it to import these morals of ours into the temples, and to imagine what is good in God's sight from the analogies of this sinful flesh?... Why do we not offer Him something which Messala's blear-eyed progeny with all his wealth cannot offer, a spirit at one with justice and right, holy in its inmost depths, and a heart steeped in nobleness and virtue? Let me but bring these to the altar, and a sacrifice of meal will be accepted!" In the third and fourth Satires he complains of the universal ignorance of our true interests, the ridicule which the world heaps on philosophy, and the hap-hazard way in which men prepare for hazardous duties. The contemptuous disgust of the brawny centurion at the (to him) unmeaning problems which philosophy starts, is vigorously delineated; [17] but some of his _tableaux_ border on the ridiculous from their stilted concision and over-drawn sharpness of outline. The undeniable virtue of the poet irritates as much as it attracts, from its pert precocity and obtrusiveness. What he means for pathos mostly chills instead of warming: "Ut nemo in se curat descendere, nemo!" [18] The poet who penned this line must surely have been tiresome company. Persius is at his best when he forgets for a moment the icy peak to which as a philosopher he has climbed, and suns himself in the valley of natural human affections--a reason why the fifth and sixth Satires, which are more personal than the rest, have always been considered greatly superior to them. The last in particular runs for more than half its length in a smooth and tolerably graceful stream of verse, which shows that Persius had much of the poetic gift, had his warped taste allowed him to give it play.