of the mind; virtue lodged at home, and afterwards diffused in her general effects, to the improvement and good of human kind. And therefore I wonder not that the present Bishop of Salisbury[34] has recommended this our author, and the Tenth Satire of Juvenal, in his Pastoral Letter, to the serious perusal and practice of the divines in his diocese, as the best common-places for their sermons, as the store-houses and magazines of moral virtues, from whence they may draw out, as they have occasion, all manner of assistance for the accomplishment of a virtuous life, which the stoicks have assigned for the great end and perfection of mankind. Herein then it is, that Persius has excelled both Juvenal and Horace. He sticks to his own philosophy; he shifts not sides, like Horace, who is sometimes an Epicurean, sometimes a Stoick, sometimes an Eclectic, as his present humour leads him; nor declaims like Juvenal against vices, more like an orator, than a philosopher. Persius is every where the same; true to the dogmas of his master. What he has learnt, he teaches vehemently; and what he teaches, that he practises himself. There is a spirit of sincerity in all he says; you may easily discern that he is in earnest, and is persuaded of that truth which he inculcates. In this I am of opinion that he excels Horace, who is commonly in jest, and laughs while he instructs; and is equal to Juvenal, who was as honest and serious as Persius, and more he could not be. Hitherto I have followed Casaubon, and enlarged upon him, because I am satisfied that he says no more than truth; the rest is almost all frivolous. For he says that Horace, being the son of a tax-gatherer, or a collector, as we call it, smells every where of the meanness of his birth and education: his conceipts are vulgar, like the subjects of his satires; that he does _plebeium sapere_, and writes not with that elevation, which becomes a satirist: that Persius, being nobly born, and of an opulent family, had likewise the advantage of a better master; Cornutus being the most learned of his time, a man of the most holy life, the chief of the Stoick sect at Rome, and not only a great philosopher, but a poet himself, and in probability a coadjutor of Persius: that, as for Juvenal, he was long a declaimer, came late to poetry, and has not been much conversant in philosophy.