The Satire opens with a dialogue between the poet himself and some one who breaks in upon his meditations. This person is usually described as his "Monitor;" some well-meaning acquaintance, who endeavors to dissuade the poet from his purpose of writing Satire. But D'Achaintre's notion, that he is rather an ill-natured critic than a good-natured adviser, seems the more tenable one, and the divisions of the first few lines have been ingeniously made to support that view. After expressing supreme contempt for the poet's opening line, he advises him, if he must needs give vent to verse, to write something more suited to the taste and spirit of the age he lives in. Persius acknowledges that this would be the more likely way to gain applause, but maintains that such approbation is not the end at which a true poet ought to aim. And this leads him to expose the miserable and corrupt taste of the poetasters of his day, and to express supreme contempt for the mania for recitation then prevalent, which had already provoked the sneers of Horace, and afterward drew down the more majestic condemnation of Juvenal. He draws a vivid picture of these depraved poets, who pander to the gross lusts of their hearers by their lascivious strains. Their affectation of speech and manner, their costly and effeminate dress, the vanity of their exalted seat, and the degraded character of their compositions; and on the other hand, the excessive and counterfeited applause of their hearers, expressed by extravagance of language and lasciviousness of gesture corresponding to the nature of the compositions, are touched with a masterly hand. He then ridicules the pretensions of these courtly votaries of the Muses, whose vanity is fostered by the interested praise of dependents and sycophants, who are the first to ridicule them behind their backs. He then makes a digression to the bar; and shows that the manly and vigorous eloquence of Cicero and Hortensius and Cato, as well as the masculine energy and dignity of Virgil, is frittered away, and diluted by the introduction of redundant and misplaced metaphor, labored antitheses, trifling conceits, accumulated epithets, and bombastic and obsolete words, and a substitution of rhetorical subtleties for that energetic simplicity which speaks _from_ and _to_ the heart. Returning to the poets, he brings in a passage of Nero's own composition as a most glaring example of these defects. This excites his friend's alarm, and elicits some cautious advice respecting the risk he encounters; which serves to draw forth a more daring avowal of his bold purpose, and an animated description of the persons whom he would wish to have for his readers. PERSIUS. "Oh the cares of men![1181] Oh how much vanity is there in human affairs!"--